Garrison Keillor to bring storytelling, ‘Lake Wobegon’ and songs to the Fox

Garrison Keillor knows Spokane from childhood visits, when his family drove from Minnesota to see an aunt who lived in this city’s outskirts.

His aunt Elizabeth lived here for roughly 15 years, before returning to Minnesota. He remembered a youthful awe of Idaho mountains heading toward Coeur d’Alene, but also memories about that aunt, a storyteller who kept track of relatives’ photos.

“She was the family historian, so we had to drive all the way out to Spokane to look at pictures of our relatives going way back,” said Keillor, 81, by phone during a recent show stop. “I first went out there I think when I was 8 years old.”

His aunt’s stories about relatives stuck with him.

“She had a great interest in our family’s history, which most of my relatives did not have, but I did,” he said. “I think that’s part of what drew me toward fiction was the chance to rewrite my family’s history and to use it to tell stories.

“When I go up to the family cemetery in Minnesota, I look at all these stones with names on them. And the people I remember are the people who told stories. Storytelling is the road to permanence to memory.”

His storytelling, along with humor and music, will return to Spokane at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, April 27, at the Fox Theater for “An Evening with Keillor & Company,” featuring vocalist Prudence Johnson and pianist Dan Chouinard.

Keillor gained fame for “A Prairie Home Companion” that ran more than 40 years and featured his stories about Lake Wobegon, a fictitious town based in part on his hometown of Anoka, Minnesota.

His radio variety show described Lake Wobegon as, “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average.” These days, his stage shows bring that dialogue, limericks, songs, audience sing-alongs and “News from Lake Wobegon.”

Keillor said the Spokane audience can expect to hear about the beauty of growing old, good luck, generosity of life and pivot-points. He also expects to add in how Lake Wobegon has changed, including a bit of a “dark side,” along with his typical whimsy.

“Mostly, it’s an old man standing up for an hour and half talking about his hometown Lake Wobegon,” he said. “I do this without notes; you shouldn’t need notes to talk about your own history, and I start wherever I’m inclined to start.

“I like to go back to early, early memories and the first girl I was in love with in school; these turns of great good fortune that change our life. You don’t realize when they happen but you look back at my stage of life and you can see how everything changes.”

He gets to that first crush, via shop class, where he was sent because of having “no aptitude for algebra, chemistry or physics.” One day when Keillor was using a rotary saw, his teacher Mr. Buehler saw him joking around with other boys and quickly shut off the power tool.

“He said, ‘I’m taking you out of class; all you do is talk, so I’m sending you to speech class,’ ” Keillor recalled. That was to Miss Person’s class, he said, where he later stood up to recite a poem he can still recall today word-for-word: Shakespeare’s Sonnet No. 29.

“I was a shy person, but I had memorized a poem and recited it, and people laughed,” he said. “It changed my life. Through misbehavior, I was sent to speech class, and there I found what would turn out to be my career.

“I can get up in front of the audience in Spokane and talk a little about this. I’ll recite poems. I’ll recite the poem that I memorized so I could recite it in Miss Person’s speech class to a girl I was in love with, Julie Christiansen.”

Keillor said he believes in the power of memorization that includes poetry.

“Here I am 81 and I still have these words that I learned when I was 15,” he added. “Now, we have Google and you can look up a poem with your cellphone, so nobody would bother to memorize these things.”

His career began at a rural Minnesota radio station after he applied for a 5 a.m. shift and got hired as the only applicant, another pivot point.

He retired from the radio show in 2016, wrapping up that summer at the Hollywood Bowl. In fall 2017, Keillor was accused of inappropriate behavior with a female colleague. Minnesota Public Radio, the show’s distributor, then cut ties with Keillor, who denied any wrongdoing.

In news coverage that followed, Keillor described it as suggestive emails he exchanged with the woman – a former freelance researcher for his show – as “romantic writing” that never resulted in a physical relationship. By April 2018, Minnesota Public Radio and Keillor reached an agreement that restored free public access to the online archives of “A Prairie Home Companion” and “The Writer’s Almanac.”

Describing his current stage show, Keillor said he wants to catch people up on what’s happened in Lake Wobegon.

“I always presented Lake Wobegon as the little town that time forgot, but in fact it has changed, as everything does,” he said. “I want to talk about things that I could not talk about on the radio, because they would have embarrassed people who live in Lake Wobegon, but I can talk about them in Spokane.”

A funeral will likely come up.

“I am at that age where people I went to school with are fading away,” he said. “Tall trees are falling, so I think I owe it to the audience to tell some story about a funeral. I don’t want to ignore the reality of old age, not to give away the secret. There is death to be discussed.”

Keillor is busy with multiple projects today, but he does the shows because people ask for them, he said.

“I love doing it, but don’t have to,” he said. “My wife and I live in New York and have our own lives. I’m a writer, I’m working on a musical and novel, I write a twice-weekly column online.

“There are still people who want to come see this show who remember the radio show, but there are younger people who are curious as well. They want to come and see an 81-year-old man stand up there and tell them that 81 is a great age. You have to be a little bit lucky, but it’s a great age.”

He hopes to do several audience sing-alongs in Spokane, with well-known tunes from “My Country ’Tis of Thee” to “America the Beautiful,” even a bit of Beatles and hymns. He’s discovered audiences are amazed at how good they sound a cappella.

“That’s a part of the show that really moves me to tears,” he said, “because people sound so good, and they know the words.

“People my generation, maybe the generation after, are the last people who know the words by heart, I think. The younger generation coming up, they don’t have these songs in common. I wish they did.”

Keillor also has written dozens of books, including “Cheerfulness,” “Boom Town: A Lake Wobegon Novel,” “That Time of Year” and “Serenity at 70, Gaiety at 80.”