A Prairie Home Companion

For the past few years I have enjoyed listening to A Prairie Home Companion. It's modeled after an old time radio show and is recorded each week by Garrison Keilor, http://prairiehome.publicradio.org , for National Public Radio (NPR). I was able to convince my buddy Mark, a native North Dakotan and former resident of the "Frozen Tundra" to accompany me to St. Paul, MN this weekend to attend a live broadcast.

We flew up early Saturday morning. The flight was wide open and we both landed ourselves nice seats in First Class. We arrived at the Minneapolis/St. Paul Airport, hopped in a rental car (which had North Dakota plates, we figured it was a sign) and drove to our hotel to drop our things off and then headed for St. Paul.
It was a gorgeous day. Temperatures were in the mid 70's and it was the perfect weather to be outside. We started out on Grand Avenue. It's kind of a yuppie section of St. Paul with lots of restored houses and small shops, organic groceries, etc. Mark had located a little restaurant called The Italian Pie Shoppe, that the Internet had reported was the maker of Rhubarb pie (in keeping it a true Prairie Home Companion weekend we wanted to try Beep-bop-a-ree-bop Rhubarb pie) but we soon discovered that this restaurant was not a place to get said pie. (We never did get to find a place that served it). We walked up and down Grand Ave. Mark found a place called The Northern Brewer, a store that specializes in things one needs to home brew your own beer (his hobby) and I stumbled across a place called Northern Lights Tea, where I got some great new loose teas to try.


Next we headed for downtown St. Paul. Half the streets were closed for repaving, so we kind of had a hard time finding a place to park. We wanted to park close to the restaurant called The Liffey, a Irish pub where we would be meeting some of his friends after the show, but for the life of us we could not figure out where to park. We finally settled on a parking garage connected to the Holiday Inn, which ironically was also the home to The Liffey, so we couldn't had that work out better. We walked across downtown St. Paul for the Fitzgerald Theater, where APHC was recorded. We got to the theater no problem but still had some time to kill so we went in search of beer. We must of walked over half of downtown but for the life of us we could not find a place. The bars we did find did not open until 4, and it was more like 2:30 - 3:00. We did manage to find a fancy hotel called The Saint Paul, and sure enough they had a bar. It was actually quite nice, and had a nice collection of Single Malt Scotch (but I stuck to beer). We had a few brewskies and enjoyed talking with the bartender. He even cracked a joke about The Christmas Story, which is one of my favorite movies, and had me on stitches.


On our way back to the Fitzgerald Theater, we stumbled across some Peanuts statues. St. Paul was the home of Charles Schultz. After some creative posing, we made our way to the "Fitz". We stopped at Mickey's diner on the way, but still no Rhubarb Pie.



We arrived at the theater and Mark saw they had Grainbelt, which is some sort of beer you can only get in this area and he grew nostalgic so he had one. I tasted it and it was nothing special, but he was so excited to see they had it, so I was happy for him.

Our seats were 2nd Balcony, 2nd row, so we had a great view of the stage (albeit a little higher than we would have liked, but fine nonetheless). In addition to Garrison Keilor and his normal repertoire of radio actors, the special guests featured a singer/song writer from Montana, Stephanie Davis; country singer Becky Schlegel, master fiddler Stuart Duncan, and this man who could play all sorts of instruments, Mike Seeger. The show started a few minutes before 5pm with Garrison and Becky Schlegel singing a song. The show went live at 5pm sharp and Garrison started off with a joke about Fidel Castro, saying that in a recent interview Fidel proved that not only is he alive, but that he intends to outlive the Bush Administration.... just like all of us. The theater erupted in thunderous laughter! (Mr. Keilor is a huge liberal, perhaps why I am such a fan). In addition to some great music and the weekly "News from Lake Wobegon", we got to listen to skits involving perennial characters like Ken, the starving artist; The Lives of the Cowboys with Dusty and Lefty, and a particularly funny episode of Guy Noir, Private Eye, involving a stint working for the TSA; and the Powdermilk Biscuits song (Heavens! They're tasty and expeditious)

The show came to end around 7pm and we made our way down from the nosebleed section. I stopped at the gift stand and got a Dusty and Lefty T-shirt and an American Duct Tape Council cap, and we made our way back across downtown to meet up with Mark's friends Lisa and Ryan (her husband) at the Liffey. Mark and Lisa grew up together in Partial, ND (pop. 900) and went to UND together, but had not seen each other in 10 years, so he was real excited to see them. They had a good time catching up about their old friends from back home, and it was interesting to hear them talk about life growing up in a small town in literally the middle of nowhere. The food was fantastic. Mark had been talking about having a Walleye sandwich since before we left Dallas, which he did. I had Corned beef and Cabbage. We all sat on the terrace up on the roof. The weather was still quite nice. We got to see a white trash bride and her white trash friends. Colorful people always make the evenings more fun.

Around 10pm, we said out goodbyes and headed back to our little Residence Inn at the MSP Airport. We were both exhausted and we slept pretty well. The alarm rang pretty early at 6am. I had taken my laptop and got us put on the standby list and we headed down to the lobby for breakfast. We returned the car no problem and got thru security just fine. At that point the easiness of the day came to a halt when a Hockey team of 25 that was confirmed on the 5:30pm departure that evening decided to standby for the 9:15am flight we were on. They gobbled up all the open seats. To make matters worse, the rest of the flights that day up until the 5:30pm flight were full. I of course could have taken the jumpseat, but since Mark was on a buddy pass, he was at a lower priority, and I didn't want to abandon him. At one point he was #35 on the list! We ended up sitting at the airport all day, watching all the flights go out full. We did enjoy a nice lunch at the Rock Bottom brewery (I had a nice unfiltered Wheat beer) and towards the end of our ordeal, did some stress eating at Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream.

Of course the 5:30 flight was wide open now (and Mark had graduated to #4 on the list) since the schmucks from the Hockey Team had gotten the earlier flight, so we got the bulkhead seats in the first row of coach and the flight home was uneventful.

All in all a great trip (minus the non rev drama). The show was fantastic. Watching it live was just like I imagined it would be when I listen to the show on the radio each week.