The Show Goes On in the Shenandoah Valley

Promo photo for Garrison's live shows - vailvalleypartnership.com

People sometimes inquire why a man of 80 keeps doing shows and I got the answer last week in the hills of Virginia, an outdoor show near Lexington, a perfect summer night after a morning downpour, an amiable crowd, Robin and Linda Williams came over from Staunton to sing with me, I talked about Lake Wobegon where there’s now a veterinary aromatherapist and people are selling artisanal ice from Lake Superior. I talked about it as a museum-quality guy who saw most of the previous century and remembers cursive writing and lightbulb jokes, and the audience stood during intermission and sang “Going to the Chapel” and “In My Life” and “America” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” — in Virginia! they knew the words about the watchfires in the circling camps, the evening dews and damps, the dim and flaring lamps. A crowd singing in harmony after sunset: it was gorgeous.

I hung out with the customers before and after (there’s no backstage at this amphitheater so I entered and exited through the audience) and it’s startling to hear middle-aged people tell me they listened to “Prairie Home” as kids, grew up with Guy Noir and Dusty and Lefty, I was sort of a distant uncle to them. I was very busy those years, hosting the show, writing it, touring around, and I was an ambitious author. My hard drive is full of the rusted wreckage of unfinished novels and stories and screenplays. I was not paying attention to the radio audience, it was only a statistic and I didn’t really believe it. And now here were the statistics shaking my hand. I stood next to them while they took a picture of the two of us.

They know all about me so I get them to talk about themselves and here’s a biochemistry professor and a young woman EMT who wants to be a doctor, a Robert Frost scholar, a Lutheran minister, a data analyst, a man who quarries limestone, a harpist who’s working as a waitress. I’m an old familiar voice to them, they’re all fresh and new to me, and every one has a story.

The radio show was a variety show, musical acts with comedy woven through it, the saga of the Little Town That Time Forgot, commercials for coffee and biscuits and the Federated Association of Organizations and rhubarb pie and the Professional Organization of English Majors, and in writing it all those years, a person never deals with the moral question, “Is this weekly two hours doing some good in the world that justifies people wasting time listening to it? Or is it simply a distraction?”

These people who cluster around me are trying to answer that question for me, which is generous of them, but I’m afraid there’s no answer, we’re all struggling to be worthwhile, I open up my laptop and see the shipwrecks, I come away from a show and I hope that the crew felt it was worth their effort, the sound guy, the operations manager, the road manager Sam Hudson, the ushers, the beer vendors, and that the crowd drives home feeling good.

I do know that there were beautiful moments. I talked about the Fourth in Lake Wobegon and the Living Flag and I sang, “O say can you see” and the crowd stood and sang the national anthem a cappella and it was in a good key, not too high, and they sang with impressive power. Their rendition of “When peace like a river attendeth my way and sorrows like sea billows roll” was so good it made you weep. And Robin and Linda’s “In the Green Summertime.” And at the end, as we were singing “I Bid You Goodnight” I stepped off the stage and lost my balance and fell into the arms of a man in the front row (gasp) and he caught me and then I hugged him and the singing continued.

So the show goes on. I’m not nostalgic about those Saturday nights going back to 1974. It’s okay that the people I met at Lexington are sentimental, but I acquired a critical eye from my evangelical family and my teachers and editors along the way, and also from my wife, Jenny, and I want these road shows to touch people and send them away happy. I stand in the back of the crowd and open the show with a sung prayer and walk through the crowd singing lines from Herrick, Marlowe, Emily D., Yeats, Blake, Shakespeare, Van Morrison (“These are the days of the endless summer”). These are evil times. I want to make light.

©Garrison Keillor