Public radio host Garrison Keillor told his trademark tales of Midwestern life Monday night in Jesse Auditorium.
Keillor, who has hosted “A Prairie Home Companion” for more than 35 years, delivered commentary on the day-to-day indignities of living in the Midwest.
“Here it’s still March, the month God designed to show people who don’t drink what a hangover is like,” Keillor said at one point during the show.
Keillor spoke about the ordeal of getting older, complaining that each day reminds him that he is approaching death.
“I am at that age, that strange age when people reach for your elbow as you walk down the stairs,” he said.
He said that he often wants to walk into a bar and tap young men on the shoulder to start a fight.
“Which one of you fairies wants to take on a 68-year-old public radio announcer?” he said.
Keillor opened the show by grabbing his microphone stand and crooning into it, his bright red sneakers and matching socks contrasting his black business suit. Then, furrowing his bushy eyebrows, he began to lambaste the college students he sees in coffee shops in St. Paul, Minn., near his home.
“They’ve never read the news in a paper that, like, you know, opens up!” Keillor said.
Keillor said the students all want to be artists, not realizing that the key ingredient to art is an unhappy childhood. Their generation grew up with participation prizes and praise, Keillor said, and their permissive parents allowed them to pierce their every orifice.
“It looks like they fell face-first into a tackle box,” he said.
The radio host talked about his own childhood, describing himself as an awkward bookworm with horn-rimmed glasses and a home haircut. He said comically neglectful parents shaped his generation’s worldview.
“As soon as you could reach the doorknob, you were urged to go outside and stay there for a while,” he joked.
When Keillor was 13 years old, his parents even left him behind on a road trip to Yellowstone National Park.
He said the family stopped at a gas station in Jamestown, N.D., and he went to the bathroom to throw up. When he came out, they were gone, and they didn’t call the station until 9 p.m., when they were already in Montana.
His mother told him they would rather not come back because his five siblings would never get to see the national park, so the family left him to pump gas with strangers for three days until they picked him up on the way back.
Fulton resident Barry Brooks listens to Keillor’s _Prairie Home Companion_ on KBIA/91.3 FM every Saturday at 5 p.m. He said the Yellowstone story was his favorite part of Keillor’s talk.
“I can picture his family leaving him there,” Brooks said.
Rocheport resident Tawnee Dufur said seeing Keillor in-person was a childhood dream of hers. Dufur’s family did not own a TV until she was 16 years old; in her home, there was a different weekly tradition.
“On Saturday evenings, we’d listen to _Prairie Home Companion_,” she said.
At the end of one of Keillor’s long, intricate stories about the hapless citizens of the fictional town of Lake Wobegon, Minn., a woman in the audience shouted, “You’re incredible, Garrison!” Keillor responded by grabbing the microphone and singing once more.
“I wish he wasn’t leaving _Prairie Home Companion_, but he’s retiring,” Brooks said. “This is his last season.”