GARRISON KEILLOR: A Prairie Home Conundrum
By John Mackey
Photo courtesy Brian Velenchenko
January/February 2007




It was one of those gray and drizzly mornings in November when the call came into my office. Too bad I was having a waffle and a steaming cup o’ Joe at Linnaea’s Cafe at the time or I would have been all over that call by the first or second ring. Turned out the Big Chief wanted to see me pronto, and he had big, big news – or he was saying I had a big, big nose. Not quite sure; it was a lousy connection.

When I arrived at HQ, he was beside himself. His life-sized cardboard standee always struck me as a tad narcissistic, but who was I to judge? “Great Keillor’s Ghost!” he bellowed, “I called you over two hours ago Mack. Where have you been?” After explaining to him that a waffle of that quality requires savoring and that he was not exactly lacking in the schnozzola department himself, we got down to brass tacks … then we got down to business. He mentioned a mimeographed memo marketing a mysterious Minnesota media mogul migrating for a meeting momentarily in my municipality. “Mmm, mysterious,” I murmured. It wasn’t much to go on, but when it comes to the business of other people’s business, there’s only one budinski to call, and that’s me: Mackey, P.I.E. [Private Investigator Esq.].

After days on the beat, a combination of razor-sharp deductive reasoning, expert trash can rummaging, and copious waffle consumption led to the whereabouts of this misanthropic Minnesotite. Turns out a certain Gary Edward Keillor or Garrison, as he likes to be called for obviously nefarious reasons, was right under my normally-sized nose all along. I uncovered his whereabouts after a fruitless morning of waffles and dumpster diving by accidentally stumbling onto his quaint little radio show A Prairie Home Companion on something called National Public Radio. After a few subsequent Saturday afternoons of radio recon – along with numerous Mason jars of sweet tea and slices of rhubarb pie – I pinpointed the center of his operation to the teeming metropolis of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, where his uncanny knowledge of the day-to-day goings-on of its innocent citizenry bordered on the Orwellian. From conversations at the local Chatterbox Café to intimate pillow talk, this Big Brother of a silly uncle knew the who, what, and where of every Tom, Dick, and Mary-Lou in town. Although his radio show was a skillful mix of entertaining musical acts and a whimsical skit or two, it was clear our down-home, cracker-barrel country gentleman was sitting in his ice fishing shack teleconferencing with his staff to plot his next power play, perhaps landing a few Walleye in the process.

Then the break in the case I was waiting for fell in my laptop. After using the Google on my various Internets, I discovered this sentinel of middle-American values and stark defender of the church social had a shady past that would send the average Methodist on a head-shaking, tisk-tisk tangent that could induce severe whiplash to the novice judgment passer. From being married three times to three entirely different women to writing for the east coast version of Pravda (New Yorker Magazine), this man was a walking contradiction in bright red loafers.

So, who was the real Gary, I mean, Garrison Keillor? Was it homemade peach cobbler on Aunt Sara’s porch or Steak Tar-Tar at Sardi’s? An old blue-tick hound-dog named Hooch or a purse-sized Lhasa Apso named Biskaya? This Keillor character was obviously a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham – but no one seemed to care. Soon, you couldn’t turn around without seeing his bespectacled, prune-like visage hawking everything from his hit movie, best-selling books, and DVD’s to lucrative commercial endorsements for Guys’ Shoes, Bertha’s Kitty Boutique, and Powdermilk Biscuits that surely must rake him in millions, not to mention all the biscuits he could eat. But even with all this incriminating evidence I’d compiled against the man, I too soon fell under the hexing spell of Keillor’s monotone siren song, and, before I knew it, I too had exchanged my badge for a one-way ticket to Lake Wobegon, a mythical place where indeed all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.

Guess we can close the book on that case.

Be well, do good work, and eat plenty of waffles.

Garrison Keillor is the host and writer of A Prairie Home Companion and The Writer’s Almanac heard on public radio stations across the country and the author of more than a dozen books, including Lake Wobegon Days, The Book of Guys, Love Me, and Homegrown Democrat.


A Prairie Home Companion public radio show is now in its 32nd year of production. Live every Saturday night from 5-7 p.m. CT, A Prairie Home Companion features comedy sketches, music, and Garrison Keillor’s signature monologue, “The News from Lake Wobegon.”


The 2006 movie, A Prairie Home Companion, directed by the late Robert Altman, is a celebrity version of Garrison Keillor’s radio show featuring Garrison Keillor (as himself), Tommy Lee Jones, Virginia Madsen, Lily Tomlin, Meryl Streep, Lindsay Lohan, Woody Harrelson, and more.

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