Show Business: Leaving Lake Wobegon Garrison

Keillor closes down a unique radio show

He had left home long before, choking on prudence and rectitude, clawing at his collar for air. Exile was the bittersweet point of those fond and misty monologues about Lake Wobegon, the tiny, imaginary Minnesota town "that time forgot, that the decades cannot improve." The wry truth was that Garrison Keillor, celebrated shy person, uncorkable parlor baritone, world's tallest radio humorist, could abide the rural Midwest only in memory. Much of his audience had made the same journey, or nearly, and we loved to be persuaded, as we listened on public radio each Saturday to the extraordinary two-hour variety show called...

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