Dusty and Lefty

If life teaches us anything, it is that being smart is overrated. After all, a wise man once said, “Intelligence is like four wheel drive. It only gets you stuck in more remote locations.” I wish I could remember who that wise person was. It must have been Plato or Aristotle, or maybe Regis Philbin (may he rest in peace). No, wait, I recall now. It was that guy who used to have that cornball radio show. The one that was satirized on The Simpsons. (What hasn’t been satirized by The Simpsons in the past thirty years?) Homer was staring at the TV while some guy was reading a letter about the peculiar citizens of some backwater bumpkinville in Minnesota. Stupefied, Homer kept exclaiming, “That’s not funny, that’s not funny!”

Of course, Homer Simpson might not be the best judge of humor. Homer needed someone to smack him over the head, somebody like Krusty the Clown. A comedian, as far as Homer was concerned, should be a buffoon, and a comic performance needed to be ridiculous and absurd. Sort of like a Trump press conference. Gary Edward Keillor, reinvented as Garrison, is not the kind of guy to put on that type of show. Keillor would just expound on the very human failings and frailties of small town life. It seems boring on the surface. Who would want to hear about the residents of Lake Wobegon “where the women are strong, the men are good looking, and all the children above average”? Isn’t that the kind of place many people deliberately escape once they become of age? Well, yeah, they do, but later on a funny thing happens. Many of those same escapees begin to reflect on their backgrounds. They start to feel nostalgic. They wonder what affect those origins had on the people they eventually became.

Enter Keillor. He holds a mirror up to those small town folk with all their hopes, fears, pretensions, and foibles. The audience recognizes their family members, neighbors, and ultimately themselves. Listeners can laugh at Keillor’s portrayals without feeling that they are denigrating their communities because they are also laughing at themselves. (Of course, you need to be the kind of person who is capable of that.) Keillor created a variety of characters to help him tell his stories and make his observations. Perhaps the most surreal were Dusty and Lefty, stereotypical cowboys wandering through modern America while trying to make sense of it. During one “Lives of the Cowboys” skit, Lefty (Keillor) explained to Dusty that “librarians possess a vast store of politeness. These are people who get asked regularly the dumbest questions on God’s green earth. These people tolerate every kind of crank and eccentric and mouth breather there is.” As a veteran librarian, I felt that Keillor had accurately captured at least one aspect of my job. The observation also made me feel nostalgic, because by that time questions of any type were becoming few and far between. People had come to believe that the Google machine would provide them with all the answers they would ever need.

Similarly, Keillor must have felt that the time had come when there just wouldn’t be an audience for his type of humor. How long would anyone want to hear about how the Sons of Knute Lodge left a jack to hold up one end of their clubhouse for forty years while they considered how to go about replacing the cracked section of foundation they had removed? Or how Lake Wobegon mothers insisted on serving their offspring lutefisk, “a repulsive, gelatinous, fishlike dish that tasted of soap and gave off an odor that would gag a goat.” Or how Clarence Bunsen’s grandfather lived to be eighty-four by living on fried chicken skin, cigar butts, and all the Rock ‘n Rye he could sneak when his wife wasn’t looking? After eleven years, Keillor guessed that listeners had just about had their fill so he retired the original Prairie Home Companion radio show and moved on. Two years later he was back, relaunching his program. He had made an important discovery. He was the radio show. It was what he did. What else could he do? It ran for another twenty-seven years.

Another life lesson: we can’t really retire. We can’t just pack it in and go fishing, or can we? I think we all need a creative outlet of some kind. We can retire from a job, but we must retire to something. Something meaningful, impactful or at least worthy of our attention and effort. I don’t know what Garrison Keillor is doing these days, but I understand he has a bookstore that’s still operating in St. Paul. If anyone happens to hear that Dusty and Lefty are stopping by for a book signing, let me know. It might be worth the trip.