Trip to Lake Woebegone

Garrison Keillor broadcast The prairie Home Companion live from the War Memorial Opera House yesterday. I gave Mr Hands tickets for Christmas, so we dressed up and joined the rest of the NPR crowd for the afternoon.

I enjoyed being in the Opera House itself, with its sculptured Beau-Arts architecture and gilt, gilt, gilt everywhere. I hadn't been in the Opera House since my mother took me, the aspiring prima ballerina--or at least aspiring to be Clara in The Nutcracker, to see the San Francisco Ballet. In our particular seats, we were more intimate with the chandelier than with the goings-on on the stage,
but it gave us a great vantage point of the whole place.

Admittedly I spent some time wondering how I could politely and temorarily decapitate the person in front of me.

Garrison: a rare, smart crack-up with a voice I can listen to for hours. His is a breathy, rich voice with a smooth cadence and a choppy delivery. For years, I imagined that he looked exactly like the father of my childhood friend, a willowy but sturdy Norwegian man with sand-colored complexion and blue eyes. The first time I saw him, on TV, I was toubled trying to reconcile the imagined man with the actual person. He looks--well, severe is one way to put it. Frankly, he is not a pretty man, and that did not jive for me with the bard/singer's voice. Alas, into every life a little rain must fall, no? I'm a loyal listener and fan. And Mr. Hands is, too.

Despite a dippy musical guest, we were thoroughly charmed and entertained.Garrison waxed politically complimentary about Nancy Pelosi, satirically admonishing about J.T. Leroy, gracefully reflective about the city's architecture and history. He took hold of his "big chance" to sing opera at the War Memorial with both hands and launched giddily into an amusing operatic and biographical (?) solo about what might have happened if the draft board had sent him a notice and he had ended up, renamed Planet Harmony, in a Salinas commune. L'amor for sure. Funny man.