Bruner Blog

I was just listening to the Sunday afternoon rebroadcast of Prairie Home Companion, and in Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegone monologue, he tells a hilarious tale (what else?) of a busload of 40 NY analysts back in the ’60s getting stranded in Lake Woebegone during a winter blizzard. So the friendly Lake Woebegoneans take the analysts into their homes and, in an effort to fight the cabin-fever blues, the mayor’s wife takes a carload of them out for a drive at night. Being a local, she’s doing 65 mph on the snow-covered roads. The analysts are already terrified, when suddenly a deer jumps out in front of them. Without flinching, she drives straight through the deer, killing it, its body flying over the windshield and roof. The analysts are shocked. One shouts, “You killed it!” to which she replies (as close as I can remember Keillor’s prose):

“Yes, well better him than us. You never brake for deer. Don’t swerve, maybe slow down a bit, but never brake. And better that he’s dead than off in the woods with a broken leg waiting for the coyotes. It’s just God’s way of improving the species, thinning out the ones with poor judgement.”

That’s the kind of good country wisdom you just don’t get from most pop culture or the NYC lifestyle. That vignette may save my life some snowy day, PETA hatemail notwithstanding.

Prairie Home is broadcasting for the last couple and next three (?) weeks from NYC’s Town Hall, hence the NY theme. And I was supposed to attend, but I got screwed by the system! I’ve learned from previous experience that Garrison Keillor sells out venues faster than Madonna. This time I put it in my calendar ahead of time and went online to buy my tickets within hours of their having gone on sale, only to get a call from Prairie Home’s Minnesota headquarter office weeks later saying that regrettably demand far surpassed their expectations (despite five shows here!) and they vastly oversold tickets and unfortunately, I was one of the losers. Grrrr.

I did see the show live once in San Francisco, after I bought tickets at the show from a woman whose husband was a no-show, in the furtherest back corner in the theater. But it was great. Every time he’s come back to NY since I’ve been living here, I’ve tried again but to no avail. If anyone out there pulls strings at NPR and can get me a ticket…

Why am I such a Garrison Keillor groupie? (Better that than a Christopher Hitchens groupie, if you ask me.) Both of my parents immigrated to NJ from Minnesota. It’s in the blood. If I can’t be Jewish, it’s the next-best thing I’ve got.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, December 8th, 2002 at 10:12 am and is filed under aa-home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.