FAREWELLS TO ‘PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION’ : In Minnesota, Cash Registers Ring Out a Goodby to Keillor

It’s been a loud week in Lake Wobegon, Garrison Keillor’s hometown.

The sound of the cash register in the World Theatre gift shop was ringing nonstop Friday morning. Three different editions of Keillor’s best-selling “Lake Wobegon Days” and Powdermilk Biscuits sweat shirts, all sizes for $16 a piece, have been going like hot cakes all week long.

It was nearly as noisy as the box office next door, where the phone was jangling as often as the gift shop cash register. Dozens of fans who either had not heard or refused to believe that tonight’s final live performance of “A Prairie Home Companion” was sold out weeks ago began calling as soon as the box office opened Friday morning.

The news from Lake Wobegon was that all 925 World Theatre seats--including the eight box seats down front that went for $1,000 each--were gone.

After a 13-year run on public radio, Keillor is leaving his show, his home state and even his country. He’ll be an American in Copenhagen soon, where he plans to learn Danish, his new wife Ulla Skaerved’s native tongue, and to continue writing about his mythical Lake Wobegon in his own native tongue, English.

His first effort will be a New Yorker magazine article on what it’s like to be a tall, gangly Midwesterner trying to get along in Scandinavia. There may eventually be a sequel to “Lake Wobegon Days.” And there may be a movie.

And Keillor himself may return to Minnesota someday. But nobody’s holding his breath in St. Paul, home of the tiny World Theatre that has become familiar to an estimated 3 1/2 million radio listeners who tune in each week to Keillor’s down-home, bluegrass satire of small-town America.

Keillor has been hailed often as the modern-day Mark Twain--a gifted humorist with a genius for gently piercing the foibles of Norwegian bachelor farmers and uptight Midwestern Puritans. But the warm, poignant epitaphs in national magazines and newspapers and on network television this week don’t truly reflect the civic ambivalence surrounding the departure of St. Paul’s most famous native son.

Keillor, a self-styled “shy person,” has been at war with the local newspapers for more than a year, in part because his home address, salary, property-tax rate and other personal information about his courtship of Skaerved appeared in the St. Paul Pioneer Press Dispatch.

He has complained often and bitterly that his national notoriety as a best-selling author, radio cult hero and Time magazine cover subject has turned his private life into a public spectacle. The high price of celebrity has been as big a factor in the 44-year-old storyteller’s decision to leave the United States as his desire to return to the solitary life of a fiction writer.

Keillor’s friends and neighbors in St. Paul have mixed feelings about his departure.

“Garrison Keillor is a spoiled brat,” Joanne Pingle wrote in the Pioneer Press Dispatch a few weeks back. “I hope he gets the anonymity he so richly deserves in Denmark.”

Keillor’s house has been picketed, his 17-year-old son has been harassed and his car was egged after he announced to the world four months ago over American Public Radio (broadcast in Los Angeles on KUSC-FM) that he was leaving St. Paul behind. In an interview with a Detroit newspaper, he remarked that his departure from St. Paul would leave only the governor (St. Paul is Minnesota’s capital), the mayor and the local TV weatherman as the city’s celebrities.

That statement, repeated many times in the local news media, further widened the breech between Keillor and the people about whom he writes and talks.

Yet the same newspaper that printed his address and the other personal information was editorially lamenting his departure in articles and commentary this week that indicated his like may not appear again soon in as unlikely a location as eastern Minnesota.

“For two hours each week, ‘A Prairie Home Companion’ has given refuge from a world of franchised food, corporate dress codes, tract houses, copycat TV shows and other efforts to make us all similar and inoffensive,” wrote Sylvia Paine, a Pioneer Press Dispatch columnist. “It is unique, an oddball piece of theater if ever there was one, and the only place to hear such stories, such music. So far, at least, no one has tried to imitate Keillor.”

After tonight, “A Prairie Home Companion” goes into reruns for at least the next six months and its producer, Minnesota Public Radio, hopes that it will do as well in radio syndication as “MASH” has done on television.

Noah Adams, former co-host of National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” is currently developing his own variety program to replace Keillor, but it won’t be ready for broadcast nationally until January.

In the meantime, Minnesota Public Radio is making every attempt to cash in as much as possible on the Keillor phenomenon. Company spokesman Alison Circle said Friday that it was too soon to determine exactly how much the final rush for “A Prairie Home Companion” merchandise and tickets might earn for the show’s producer, but she added that she expected that it would be well into the thousands of dollars.

Minnesota Public Radio officials have admitted that they don’t know if they will ever have as lucrative a program again.