Details from The Prairie Home Companion

Dr. Peds and I had a great time watching the Prairie Home Companion live broadcast from Duluth last Saturday.  Click here to listen if you missed it.  We’ve been big fans of the show for years and years, and just get a tremendous kick out of listening to it on the radio whenever we can.  When we were first married, I listened every Saturday night and cleaned my whole house from top to bottom.  By the time the show was done, my house was clean, and it stayed mostly clean all week.  That is no longer the case.  Now I’m usually begging my noisy crew to “JUST BE QUIET!” so I can hear what’s going on, and as often as not, I simply forget to listen at all because of the chaos happening at that time, the craziest time of the day every day.

However, we had a terrific time!  The show was funny, and bizarre.  I love watching the actors and sound effects.  It’s so different to see it and hear it at once!  And I always appreciate seeing live music being performed.  I love that they had the Grand Rapids High School Jazz Ensemble as a guest. Yay music education!  How awesome for those kids!  And I was super duper impressed by my first experience with the Duluth progressive bluegrass band Trampled by Turtles.  I’d been hearing things about this band.  They did not disappoint.  It’s not  a genre of music that I ever really listen to (I’m just a classical girl through and through) but they were really good.  Even I could tell they were really, really good.  They were downright mesmerizing to watch, and Dr. Peds has been downloading their music since we got home.  The Banana and even Mr. Trouble on Feet have been enjoying singing along.

There were so many details to remember.  I was riveted to what was happening onstage the whole time I was there.  I had forgotten from the last time we went when they were broadcasting in Duluth, several years ago now, that Garrison Keillor wears a suit with groovy red sneakers.  I love that.  I love watching that short, crazy haired pianist lead the Guy’s All Star Shoe band.  His fingers fly over those keys, and he is ON TOP of what is going on and how everything has to be timed.  I love that it’s such a radio show.  They are there to be radio show, and when you watch, you feel like you’re kind of a mouse in the corner even though you are in a large, sold out auditorium with kajillions of other mice.  When they are done with a particular script, they just let it gently fall to the floor from their stands.  Half the time Garrison Keillor turns around and talks facing the back of the stage, and when he is talking to a guest, he forgets they might like their own personal space.  We were trying to figure out if this is because he’s going to hand the microphone back and forth.  Regardless, his guests always seem to be trying to back up and get some breathing room.  It makes me giggle.  It’s just plain fun to see those staple songs like the Powdermilk biscuit theme and the rhubarb pie jingle performed live.  I was super excited that Garrison Keillor, who has poetry taste that I have always been in line with and admired, read some poems by the most famous local poet, although truthfully, Jenkins is really not one of my favorite poets.  I did like the poems, though.  They were better heard than read silently in my head, I decided.  The whole show was chalk full of references to Duluth, which was really fun.

We really enjoyed ourselves, which was a good thing, since when I ordered the tickets I accidentally bought them from a ticket scalper that looked like a legit thing and ended up paying three times the real price for the tickets.  It’s a long story, but suffice it to say that I really learned a lesson and will be extremely discretionary in the future when ordering tickets.  During the show,  I had to stifle my husband’s desire to constantly whistle really loud and yell after great musical moments.  The whistles were ear shatteringly loud, and all of the people around us were wincing.  He was a bit dejected when I told him he had to stop.  But when everyone took their final bow on stage, Dr. Peds did mention that it was definitely worth the small fortune we lost in order to be there, and that he would have gladly paid that much if that’s what the tickets really had cost.