By Dave Read, June 21, 2025 performance – An unrepentant Garrison Keillor returned to the hallowed ground of Tanglewood, where he fairly begged a pretty small audience to forgive the behavior that got him #MeToo’d out of the national audience that used to gather around the radio every Saturday at 6 p.m. to hear the news from Lake Wobegone.
Woe begone is he who is too deaf to hear NPR’s quasi-judicial verdict: “Hands off, old man!” When fellow Minnesota funny guy Al Franken got caught with his hands in the cookie jar, he was man enough to quit the Senate, even if we wish he hadn’t. Not so man-boy Keillor, whose tarnished brand lets him sell enough tickets to hire a band, radio actors, a sound-effects wizard, plus women to sing beside and with him.
We view the summary judgment of hashtags in the same light as we view the summary deportations of ICE. Keillor, however, proved the validity of accusations made against him when he devoted much of this show’s opening to joking about them. No innocent jokes either, he had the gall to assert that men only do what women make them do. He trotted out the Cupid defense, so full of himself that he can’t see how stupid that makes him look.
We started listening to the show early during the sleepwalk of Reagan’s presidency. In the mid-1990s, when Bertha’s Kitty Boutique, “For persons who care for cats,” was the program’s chief fake sponsor, we invented an aerosol spray called Air of the Dog, “for our friends who don’t care for cats.” One spray and cats ignore the insensitive (or allergic) friends and relatives who visit cat lovers.
I mailed my gag to the show and got a polite response along the lines of “Mr. Keillor likes your idea, but we write all material in-house.” Tonight, my idea finally made it’s way onto the show, such as it is. The freshest thing I heard was a promo for a fake product called Sandy’s Aerosol Sneakers, which emit an aroma designed to hide the smell of farts.
The host will claim the gag is based on real products in real stores, and maybe it is, but there’s no masking the odor emitted by some old farts. You’re welcome to the gag – here’s Pastor Ingqvist, he’ll see you home.
2000-2016 A Prairie Home at Tanglewood
Links to reviews of A Prairie Home Companion at Tanglewood between 2000-2016.