Garrison Keillor, who brought his radio show (this year it’s called American Radio Company) to the Chicago Theatre recently, is a man in search of an identity. As he tries to broaden the scope of his show without losing his old Prairie Home Companion audience, casting about for a persona to replace his quaint midwestern professional “shy person”–which his fans love but which he’s manifestly outgrown–his skits, songs, and monologues seem in constant danger of slipping into cuteness and sentimentality on the one hand, or of underhandedly sniping at his audience on the other.
Living abroad didn’t work out, though, and soon Keillor and wife were back in the U.S., but living in New York rather than Minneapolis. In 1989 Keillor returned to public radio with a new variety show, at first called the American Radio Company of the Air, originating from the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Apparently, though, the response in New York was not as good as hoped for (certainly there’s an inherent contradiction in basing Keillor’s sort of folksy entertainment in that most urban of all metropolises, a contradiction more highlighted than overcome by the show’s soft jokes and skits about the city); in any case the radio audience for the new concept fell far short of the old Companion’s.
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“It was a wonderful war. Cause everybody knew what they were fighting for. Not many people died. And almost all of them were on the other side. And the weapons worked great. And the country showed strength. And it lasted a month–which was just the right length. It was a wonderful war. [A fair amount of applause here.] It was a war-movie war, with the rockets flying up from the ships offshore. It was all on TV. And we lay on the couch and watched it, Lucy and me. And she said, ‘It’s so awful–America at war again.’ But actually it didn’t look that bad on CNN. It was a wonderful war. With Panama it makes a doubleheader–two wars to make you smile. Only World War II was better. But a war as good as that only comes along once in a while. And now the war’s done, I wonder when we’re gonna have another one. Maybe Iran or Afghanistan. Or maybe we’ll go and settle up with Japan. [Laughter] But one thing’s for sure. I don’t think we’re gonna go to Greece this year. No, I think we’ll stay around home this year. Or maybe we could go to London this year. But it’s gonna be a while before we go see the Nile. [A little laughter, a fairly big round of applause.]”
Keillor presents himself offstage, in other words, much as he does on–as an insightful but humble small-town fellow, plain and essentially simple, who just happens to like telling stories on the radio. “I’ve spent the last 20 years trying to produce that kind of a show because–because I like doing it, frankly,” he went on to tell me. “It’s more fun than television and it’s a way to say what you have to say to an audience that you’re fond of. . . . It’s fun to do and it’s boring to talk about.”
