Not without those trademark red tennis shoes, the "Prairie Home Companion" host entertained the audience last Saturday night at the Fox Cities Performing Arts Center in Appleton, Wisconsin. Garrison Keillor acknowledging that "We've not done a show entirely devoted to a particular city in a long time." This particular show in Appleton featured comedy sketches detective Guy Noir and music by six hometown musical acts.
Keillor prepped well in advance for Saturday's show, gathering as much information about the Fox Cities and dutifully looked over piles of notes in order to share interesting facts about the city of Appleton and its surrounding communities. Some local talent that shared the stage with the popular radio host included: pianist, singer and songwriter Helen Exner, teen pop/rock band Dance Billy Dance and classical violinist Jonathan Eddy, among several others. Fans were thrilled to be a part of the audience, many of whom were longtime listeners and were pleased to finally put a face to the voice that they hear through the radio waves. Go online to obtain your own pair of A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor tickets before they all sell out for an upcoming show.
Keillor is a Minnesota native and is the host and the writer of "A Prairie Home Companion," which has been in production since 1974 and is broadcast to more than four million listeners around the country. The show runs two hours on Saturdays from five to seven Central time and is hosted at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota, although it is also frequently taken on the road.
Each show of Prairie Home Companion opens with the Spencer Williams composition "Tishomingo Blues," as the theme song, with lyrics especially written for the show. Music is probably the strongest and most popular feature of the program, acting as a sort of outlet for American folk music of varying genres like country, bluegrass, blues and gospel. Several notable performers have been frequent guests on the show like Chet Atkins, Mark Knopfler, Jeff Lang and the folk/gospel duo Robin and Linda Williams.
Other features of the show include comedy skits, one of the more popular ones being "Guy Noir, Private Eye," which makes fun of film noir. Another great feature of the program is Keillor's News from Lake Wobegon, which is a weekly storytelling monologue, which is described as a report from Keillor's fictitious hometown of Lake Wobegon, known to listeners as: "the little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve...where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking and all the children are above the average." In these segments, Keiller pokes some fun at the Scandinavian-American community in the northern parts of the Midwest.
Garrison Keiller is actually making a variety of scheduled stops coming up for tapings of his program. The latest one in Appleton was a success among viewers, though tickets to these shows sell out in no time at all. Check out a current schedule for "Prairie Home Companion" online today.
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