If your household is nerdy, literate, and musical enough, you find yourselves sitting akimbo throughout a small living room listening to a radio variety show on a Saturday night while Dad makes pizza.
It’s not the 1920’s.
Rather it’s the 2000-oughts, and the radio is tuned to WITF FM, playing A Prairie Home Companion, the brain works of writer and humorist, Garrison Keillor.
The family unit was The College Ave. Beckers, 1999-2016 (with a pre-history stretching back to St. Louis, MO and Lewisburg, PA).
Another family in Nashville was listening too. The dad may have been making pizza, but I chose to picture pork BBQ.
His name is Lee C. Camp, professor of theology at Lipscomb University. I had a beer with him in a greenhouse called The Greenhouse Bar.
It was hot and humid in the Green Hills section of Nashville, but with fans on, and a brew that closely resembled my native Vitamin Y,1 all was cool.
And Lee is way cool, too. He’s a busy guy who splits his time between professor-ing and running The Tokens Show. What’s that?
Imagine an evening of great music, some skits, and a short, yet very appropriate injection of theological discussion with a seasoned scholar or practitioner.
Dr. Camp got the idea for the show from The Prairie Home Companion. Living in Nashville, he was able to draw on some not-too-shabby musical guests such as Vince Gill.
It kind of feels like The Row House Forums in Lancaster except we tend to O.D. on the lecture content and Q&A.
We don’t do skits (though that sounds fantastic) unless you count the skinny guy with the raspy voice attempting to get a laugh.
Part of my study leave is to give thought to the possible ways we can engage our members more and reach more people.
I can’t speak for my Board, but they know I love live music. It’d be cool to host more musicians in the coming years. We’ll see what develops!
I love The Token’s tag lines because I generate such slogans as a cottage business:
Cultivating smart, adventuresome, courageous human beings through shows, podcasts, and online courses (overall)
Public theology. Human Flourishing. The Good Life (podcast)
Honoring Truth-Tellers, Justice-Seekers, and Courageous Agents of Mercy (radio)
Come on, Tom, up your game on branding! OK, let’s see, uh how ‘bout “The Row House: Making lectures sexy again!”2
Lee told me he had met Garrison Keillor once and saw the PHC show a few times.
Becky and I also met G.K. at Wolf Trap in Virginia. Besides our neighbors John and Bruce, we were hands down the youngest travelers on the WITF bus.
There was a little greeting time in the parking lot. Fans swarmed around Mr. Keillor, most darting their eyes at him, then away, not sure how to be cool with a tall celebrity.
I got my boldness on and went right up to Mark Twain in a white suit and requested he sign my copy of Good Poems, American Places.3
Slowly, he pulled a pen from his literary breast pocket, turned his eyes on the white-tennis-shoed throng in front of him, and said, “You know, Lancaster is where the Amish live.”
He said it in a cheeky way as if he knew I expected him to say the very thing everyone says about Lan-KAST-tor.
The signature landed quickly and adroitly, and if I’m not mistaken, he closed the book before he handing it back to me, wordless.
Garrison Keillor is just as surprised as anyone that his evolving road show, strung with Gospel quartets, homespun stories from Lake Wobegon, and a burgeoning sound effects component, ended up a national phenomenon in the late 1980’s.
You can read all about it.
I asked Lee if he had read G.K.’s memoir, and he admitted he had only started it. Nearly inhaling my warming beer, I pleaded with him to pick it up again. As I’m pleading with you, dear reader:
That Time of Year: A Minnesota Life
The memoir is hilarious, inventive, and full of detail, so good I could only take a chapter a day. I wanted to savor it. I still do.
Keillor weaves his aspirations, sins, and thanksgivings seamlessly into an arc of what one of his aunts called “pastoral comedy.”
At the age of ten, I rode my bicycle into downtown Minneapolis, past factories and Skid Row and two burlesque houses to the public library and enjoyed the scenery, the old bums, the bright lights, the flashy billboards, the Egyptian mummy, the burger stands. I was a happy kid, not foreboding. Like Anne Frank, I believed that people are good at heart. The Brethren anticipated the end of the world and the Judgment, and I went to the ball park and had a bratwurst.4
If his wandering from fundamentalist roots were a store front, his reconstruction of faith would be a cathedral.
I was so grateful to meet with Lee Camp and to hear the story of his show and where he hopes to take it. I hope he takes it to Lancaster for an evening. It’s a possibility.5
And, besides, the live version of The Prairie Home Companion is gone…just like last year’s snow.
That’s Yuengling Lager, my dears.
Focus groups of various Lancastrians balked at this slogan, especially the cohort we gathered up in Brickerville.
The inscription to this volume, by my daughter Eliza, is a treasure to me.
Page 343-344.
Contact me about sponsoring it you have a spare $30,000.
Prairie Home Companion + The Row House = ?
what a good meet up!!