GetOut Magazine

Garrison Keillor doesn't disappoint at book reading
By BETTY WEBB
Get Out
Nov. 7, 2002

When Changing Hands Bookstore wants to throw a fund-raiser for KJZZ and KBAQ, it does it up right. The bookstore brought in NPR's Garrison Keillor on Wednesday night to read from "Good Poems" and not only sold out the house at Red River Music Hall, but managed to sell a few standing-room-only tickets, too. Net result? Changing Hands raised more than $7,000 for the local NPR radio stations and gave upward of 1,000 people one heck of a great time.

"I've listened to Garrison Keillor for 30 years and I tape all his shows," said Mesa's Jo Marie Woolf, who had brought one of Keillor's books (she owns them all) to be signed, but who had drawn the unfortunate line-placement number of 1,020. "Last year, when he was at the Sundome (in Sun City West), I bought a $50 ticket, but then I got sick and couldn't go. I'm making up for that now."

Woolf believes one of the secrets to Keillor's popularity lies in his clean humor. "He's so clean that I've even given his tapes to my religious leaders. He said something once that really stuck with me, that he thinks that before we're born, we're all in a big gum ball machine up in heaven, all bouncing around together. Well, he and I were born in the same month in the same year, so I figure we were in that gum ball machine at exactly the same time!"

Keillor didn't disappoint his fans. The creator of "Prairie Home Companion" read a series of poignant and humorous poems adding his own commentary that reflected his good nature. Using verses from folks as diverse as William Shakespeare, Charles Bukowsky, Marge Piercy, Langston Hughes, William Butler Yeats, e.e. cummings, Robert Frost and his Lucky Strike-puffing college professor James Wright, he covered an amazingly broad area of human experience life, death and (in one hilarious poem) urination.

Much of Keillor's commentary concerned his friend Sen. Paul Wellstone, who recently died in a plane crash.

"I have a new rule in life now," Keillor said. "I'm going to start out each morning feeling grateful for what I have. And isn't that the foundation of all great religions?" He went on to explain that he'd awakened that morning in San Francisco feeling blue, and that to cheer himself up, he decided to try to contact poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, founder of the great City Lights Bookstore. To his delight, he was able to reach the literary legend and the two met for lunch.

"Ferlinghetti told me that he'd been out riding his bike and saw two beautiful young women across the street," Keillor related. "He stared at them so hard that he ran into something and fell off his bike. Those beautiful young women immediately rushed to him he is 83, you know and while they were helping him up, he tried to get their phone numbers. Well, you can't imagine how that cheered me, a man of 60, to know that I could still be going strong and pestering beautiful young women for their phone numbers when I'm 83!"

After his reading, Keillor answered questions from the audience. Most of them wanted to know about "Prairie Home Companion" or his many books. One answer in particular brought chuckles of sympathy from the audience.

"Yes, I'm always surprised when my books do well," he said. "But just think of the fate of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, one of the nation's great poets who just happens to live in San Francisco. His sales certainly aren't what they should be. You know, American literature is under control of the literary mafia back East, and the minute you move west of the Mississippi, you disappear from the radar."

Afterward, Keillor walked up to the lobby and stood there chatting and signing as his ever-faithful "Prairie Home Companion" fans handed him their books. He signed them all.