The schedule called for fifteen minutes with Garrison Keillor. It ended up being a half-hour private concert.
Keillor brings “Garrison Keillor Tonight” to the Jane Pickens Theater on September 20. “I’m doing pretty well,” he said at the start of the conversation. “I’m making progress on a new book. As long as one has a feeling of progress, you can keep going.”
Keillor is writing a memoir. “I thought the world needed a factual outlook of what it’s like to be 84. What the world looks like at 84.”
He says it helps “to have chosen the right ancestors. I don’t think that healthful living is an absolute necessity.” Keillor says he was a chain smoker for 20 years and gave up drinking his beloved scotch 25 years ago.
“It really helps to have work that you like,” he said. “Friends of mine who ran out of gas in their chosen occupations are finding it difficult” to navigate their later years.
Keillor says his show is “an odd stand-up. Some stand-up and reminiscences and odds-and-ends. I want to deliver to the audience I’m given, which is kind of a lefty audience. Not always. Not in Iowa.”
He knows his audience is getting old. “Some younger people are dragged in by grandma and grandpa.”
Keillor says he doesn’t “have any political role at all. There are other people who can do this much better. Maggie Haberman, George F. Will. I abstain from that.”
“I don’t get into the saga of Lake Woebegon,” he says. “I prefer to leave that in print rather than verbal.”
One of Keillor’s fun moments in the show is getting people to “sing the songs that we all know. My generation,” he says, “could be the last generation to know the words. If I give a note and sing, ‘My Country Tis…,’ they all know it.”
He likes to get the audience singing along with Elvis Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” He starts things off with, “Wise men say, only fools rush in,” and “it’s the most beautiful thing. People are astounded at how well they sound. It’s not about Elvis, it’s not about nostalgia, it’s not about the 50s. It’s a chance for a room full of people to be beautiful to each other and share this sense of affection. It’s very moving. I’m moved by it, and so is the audience.”
Overall, Keillor wants to praise our country. “I want to tell them something to make them feel good about the United States.” He points to “tremendous advances in my lifetime in the field of caring for people with cognitive impairment. This has been a revolution. As the father of an impaired child, I am aware of it and need to share about it.”
“Young people, when I was in my 20s, were repeatedly locked up in state institutions where over time, they were driven insane,” said Keillor. “Now we’ve identified them as autistic and we believe they have a right to a good life. We do our best to give it to them. That’s an amazing advance in civility.”
Keillor’s press release says that he “pokes fun at” Henry David Thoreau.” So, what’s his issue with one of America’s preeminent naturalists, essayists, poets, and philosophers?
“He was hugely influential to me and people I knew back in college. He was a great hero, he was a rebel, and he was on the right side of the great issue of the time, abolition.”
But looking back, “I have to kick him,” Keillor says. He takes special exception with this Thoreau quote: “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
Keillor finds that to be an arrogant statement. “This was an invitation to people to go off and do things they had no business trying to do. It led to a lot of wasted time. My generation wrote some of the worst songs. A lot of people went off and took pictures of trees and thought this was art.”
Art, says Keillor, “is a job and you have to work at it. The calling is not the crucial thing. Persistence is the crucial thing.”
Keillor has an interesting connection to Rhode Island in the form of Elder John Crandall, one of his ancestors from the 17th century. “He was preaching on the streets of Lynn, Massachusetts, where he was arrested and threatened with whipping.” Back in 1651, holding services was for some reason illegal.
Elder Crandall was released from prison after promising to appear in court but instead found his way to southern Rhode Island where he helped settle Westerly.
Keillor says he does think about retirement. “I feel as if I have a mission. It has to do with being 84 years old and standing up in front of people and being funny and giving them a good time.”
He does know there will come a time for him to step away. “I have good people who work for me. I’ve asked them to not let me make a fool of myself.”
But Keillor is certain of one thing. “I could go on doing this for a while.”
“Garrison Keillor Tonight” is presented September 20 at the Jane Pickens Theater in Newport. For tickets and information, call the box office at 401-846-5474 or visit www.janepickens.com.
