15 Years . . . and We're Just Beginning!

Susan and I had something awesome to celebrate today: our 15th wedding anniversary! Faithful readers will recall that we surprised our children with a trip to Disney World last November (read this and then click the "Disney" label beneath it for follow-up posts with photos), so we reminded ourselves of that before running out and buying additional presents for one another this month. However, we didn't want to just sit around the house today, quietly sipping milk and fondly recalling our months-ago vacation; so when Susan noticed a special event scheduled for today, we decided not to pass up the opportunity. We got tickets to see Garrison Keillor in Bismarck!

Whenever we find ourselves driving somewhere on a weekend, we tune into public radio and hope that we're in the car whenever Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion comes on. We love the mix of music and skits and guest stars and the folksy, nostalgic, literate humor of his weekly updates on the goings-on in his fictional hometown of Lake Wobegon. When Suzanna heard that we were taking them to see Garrison Keillor, she squealed and jumped up and down! (Our kids, however, were among precious few in their age bracket in attendance, as it turned out.)

The Bismarck Civic Center was one stop on The Rhubarb Tour: A Summer Evening in Lake Wobegon, so we got tickets a few weeks ago for the whole family. Suzanna has been taking band lessons last week and this week, so we waited for her to be done with those today and then left town at 2:45 P.M. (our time), arriving in Bismarck around 5:00 P.M. (their time) and heading straight for Red Lobster for supper (Abigail and I shared a healthy meal: salad with vinaigrette dressing, broiled cod, steamed broccoli, and a baked potato topped with pico de gallo). We had time afterward for a quick stop at Cold Stone Creamery for dessert (nothing healthy there: cake batter ice cream topped with Twix bars for me) before heading over to the Civic Center and finding our seats.

Suzanna snapped this pic of us waiting for our entrées to arrive at Red Lobster. Do we look as though we've been married 15 years? (Including our dating years, we've been together for 17-and-a-half.)

"Say wha-a-at?!" Here are the girlies enjoying ice cream at Cold Stone before the performance.

It was a drizzly-but-pleasant summer night: slightly cool with intermittent showers but just enough sunshine to keep things upbeat.

The Bismarck Civic Center

Our seats were so far up in the air and away from the stage for what we paid that I can't imagine what kind of short-term loans needed to be taken out by those with tickets to be seated right up front. Not to worry, though: the sound system was more than adequate for us to hear everything, and our digital camera's zoom lens served to give us a glimpse of the performers' facial features whenever the hankerin' arose. Garrison opened the evening by standing out in the house--smack dab in the middle of the audience--and singing. He wandered amongst the attendees and told stories and jokes between songs and then finally made his way up onto the stage.

Out amongst the audience . . .

. . . and on stage. He's got a face for radio!

The Guy's All-Star Shoe Band, led by Richard Dworsky, is Keillor's regular band on the radio show, and they were phenomenal tonight--very gifted musically with incredible range and versatility, all of them. Keillor also had sound effects artist Fred Newman (from public television's program Between the Lions) as a guest. Keillor would tell a rambling story with elements in it related to sounds, and Newman would respond by making the sounds using his mouth (e.g., Keillor made up a story about Newman's going to a rodeo in his youth, and as Keillor told about this event or that animal, Newman came up with the corresponding sounds). Newman was terrific at making the sounds and very funny at adding facial expressions and body language to enhance the noises. It seemed that Keillor was making it all up as he went along so that Newman himself didn't know what to expect; if so, all the more impressive!

The Guy's All-Star Shoe Band with Richard Dworsky on the piano.

Fred Newman

Newman responding with sounds to Keillor's apparently improvised tales!

Another terrific element of the night was Keillor's guest musician, country music singer Suzy Bogguss. I guess I've heard her on the radio before; I recognized "Outbound Plane" (which you can hear by clicking her name in the previous sentence) when she sang it tonight. However, I wasn't really familiar with her other than recognizing her name. Tonight she demonstrated great guitar-playing skill and a beautiful voice when singing both high and low. We'll definitely be adding her to our music library in the future!

Bogguss and Keillor doing a duet.

Midway through the night, Keillor announced an intermission and encouraged people to excuse themselves if they needed to use the restroom. However, he himself went nowhere. He called it "a standing intermission"; he asked us all to rise, and he spent about 15 minutes wandering the audience again, leading us all in a group sing-along of patriotic songs, hymns, and other common songs as we stood near our seats and stretched and got the blood flowing to our legs and buttocks again. How fun! (He wasn't even flustered when a stage hand came out and asked him to see if there was a doctor in attendance for a patron who had taken ill and was lying off to the side of the auditorium. He calmly asked for the doctor and then went on with his singing, keeping our attention away from the person on the floor. One would think that the paramedics could have helped out by actually removing the person from the auditorium.)

Keillor ended the night with a Lake Wobegon tale so convoluted and filled with Midwestern details that we were all in stitches, including the girls! He has a knack for starting one story and then going off on a tangent with another story and then doing it again until finally expertly bringing all the seemingly unrelated characters and plots together for one climactic event. Tonight's Lake Wobegon update featured the disastrous meeting of a balloonist and two rose-petal-scattering giant duck decoy pilots who weren't told about a wedding's cancellation; the surprise depantsing of an earnest grandson trying to scatter his randy granny's ashes via parasail; and the addition into this mix of an overloaded pontoon carrying 22 fatigued Lutheran ministers (and a smoking barbecue full of shrimp shish kabobs) so low on the lake that onlookers might have thought they were walking on the water (appropriately enough). It sounds utterly ridiculous when I type it, but it made perfect (and perfectly hilarious) sense when Keillor told it from the edge of the stage, never once looking at a note or a teleprompter for assistance. Impressive. It was a great way to end a very satisfying, eclectic, impressive three-hour performance.

The view from our nosebleed seats.

Before heading home, we stopped at a grocery store to pick up a couple items that Susan can never seem to find in Dickinson's grocery stores. It was a sleepy drive home, both for the slumbering children in the back and for the heavy eye lidded driver (moi). But it was a great way for us to celebrate, as a family, today's milestone.