Our friend Deborah Caulfield Rybak reports today that Garrison Keillor is apparently not interested in renewing his show’s handsome permanent lease at the Fitzgerald Theater. As DCR notes, the reasons are not entirely clear, and both Keillor and MPR chief Bill Kling expertly deflected questions about what might have really gone down. (Kling: Keillor makes his own decisions. Keillor: We gotta keep moving, keep the circulation in our toes.) True enough, a radio program creates its cognitive setting out of thin air, and it can originate from Nanook of the North’s igloo, if that’s where the gods of radio wish to do their work.
Keillor’s remark that he’d love to take the show to jolly old England for a year strikes me as brilliant–at the international level, Keillor long ago surpassed Bob Dylan and the City of Chicago as Minnesota’s most noteworthy asset. (Oh, near Chicago!–bang bang!) Also, if you love the English language, and especially the printed word, as much as Keillor does, you often wonder just what it would take to pick up and move your whole sordid freak show over the pond to the Old Sod. I’d do it in a heartbeat, just to be able to read the Guardian and Private Eye and the Tattler and Q magazine everyday. Still, Keillor’s life shows several interesting patterns that might be motivating factors . For example, I think he tends to run away rather than fight, and he’s vulnerable to the gripe that there is no honor for a prophet in his own hometown.
It may also be true that his show deserves a more frenetic, glitzy setting like the Pantages or the Orpheum in downtown Minneapolis. (Though maybe not quite ready for Rochester and Morris.) Funny how satisfaction is never permanent, restlessness is the human condition, and Keillor seems to have the old itch to shake the dust off his shoes again. That, or negotiations with MPR have broken down, and this is the nuclear option.
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