The Keillor Reader

by Garrison Keillor

  1.

  RULES OF ORCHESTRA

  I used to do concerts with orchestras, New York, Chicago, L.A., San Francisco, St. Louis, Seattle, Minnesota, and it always was scary, making my entrance up a narrow path between the first and second violins, and nodding to Maestro Philip Brunelle, and picking up my note from the cello as I sang the Habanera—“I always wanted to sing in the opera, / To sing with passion, to sing with rage / And fall in love with inappropriate women, / Fight senseless duels, and die on stage.” Then I did a concert with the Boston Symphony at Symphony Hall and thought, It will never get better than this, and sensibly retired from the field. Orchestras exist on a higher plane than the one I inhabit and consist of a secretive tribe of chummy perfectionists, one of whom I am married to.

  My wife is a violinist and violist, a freelancer, a foot soldier in God’s floating orchestra who goes off to play a wedding one night, an opera the next, and comes back to tell me stories about the squeaky soprano with the big diva attitude, the timid oboist, the blatty trombone, the conductor whose hand movements are a mystery to everyone so thank goodness for the concertmaster’s bow. Her work demands great skill for which she is paid a pittance, but she is glad for the work and proud to be among the rank and file.

  When she was fourteen, she went off to music school, then landed in New York City, still a teenager, and worked there for twenty years, bopping around from opera tour to regional symphony to pop show to Broadway pit to church gig and off to Japan with a pick-up band to do Bach and Vivaldi. She has played for Leonard Bernstein and also for the Lippizaner horses. She is a pro. And she is not tolerant of unprofessional behavior. A big star who is haughty toward the commoners backstage—that’s unprofessional. A conductor who glares at someone who just played a bad note—unprofessional. Worse than the bad note.

  You won’t find this list posted backstage, but that’s because everybody knows this stuff right out of music school.

  1.You are, of course, on time. Always. It’s amateurish to come an hour early, but never come late. Never. So orchestra players are students of public transportation and, if they drive, adept at finding parking places, legal or illegal. Everyone has a strategy for Getting to the Gig, and a back-up strategy, in case the area is cordoned off for a presidential motorcade or a gas leak or some other civil disorder.

  2.Don’t show off warming up backstage. Don’t do the Brahms Concerto. Don’t whip through the Paganini you did for your last audition. Warm up and be cool about it.

  3.Backstage you hang out with your own kind. String players with other string players, not brass or percussion. You don’t get into a big conversation with the tuba player, lest you be lulled into relaxation. He is not playing the Brandenburg No. 3 that opens the show; you are. Stick with your own kind so you can start to get nervous when you should.

  4.You never chum around with the conductor too much. Likewise the contractor who hired you; you can be nice but not fawning, subservient. If either one of them is perched in the musicians’ commons backstage, don’t gravitate there. Don’t orbit.

  5.You never look askance at someone who’s made a mistake. Never. If the clarinet squeaks, if the oboe honks, if a cello lumbers in two bars early like lost livestock, you keep your eyes where your eyes should be. You’re a musician, not a critic. String players never disparage their stand partners to others. Stand partnership is an intimate relationship, and there is a zone of safety here. Actually, you shouldn’t disparage any musician in the orchestra to anybody unless to your husband, or very good friends. But you never say anything bad about your stand partner.

  6.If the conductor is a jerk, don’t react to him whatsoever. Ignore the shows of temper, the hissy snits, the nasty looks. Turn a stone face toward him. If he makes a sarcastic joke at the expense of a musician, do not laugh, not even a slight wheeze or titter.

  7.Try to do the conductor’s bidding, no matter how ridiculous. If he says, “Play this very dry but with plenty of vibrato,” go ahead and do it, though it’s impossible. If he says, “This should be very quick but sustained,” then go ahead and sustain the quick, or levitate, or walk across the ceiling, or whatever he wants. He’s the boss.

  8.Don’t bend and sway as you play. Stay in your space. You’re not a soloist, don’t move like one. No big sweeps of the bow. And absolutely never never ever tap your foot to the music.

  9.Go through channels. If you, a fifth-stand violin, are unsure if that note in bar 134 should be C-natural as shown or B-flat, don’t raise your hand and ask the maestro, ask your section head, and let her ask Mr. Big.

  10.You do not accept violations of work rules passively. When it’s time to go, it’s time to go. If it’s Bruno Walter and the Mahler Fourth and you’re in seventh heaven, then of course you ignore the clock, but if it’s some ordinary yahoo flapping around at the podium, you put your instrument in the case when the rehearsal is supposed to end. It was his arrogant pedantry that chewed up the first hour of rehearsal, and now time is up and he’s only halfway through The Planets and is in a panic. If he wants to pay overtime, fine. Otherwise, let him hang, it’s his rope. At the performance, you can show him what terrific sight readers you all are.

  It’s all about manners and maintaining a sense of integrity in a selfless situation and surviving in a body of neurotic perfectionists. And it’s about holding up your head, even as orchestras in America languish and die out, victims of their own rigidity and stuffiness and of a sea change in American culture. Perhaps in a hundred years orchestras will be as obsolete as the six-day bicycle race. But in America’s Last Surviving Orchestra, the players will arrive on time and take their places and not look askance at malefactors and play drily but with vibrato and not tap their feet. And one violinist will come home and have a glass of wine and say to her husband, “Why can’t they find a decent trombonist?”

  2.

  FIVE COLUMNS

  I started out writing sports for the Anoka Herald, a weekly paper in my hometown, and forty years later returned to newsprint with a weekly syndicated column that appeared in little papers and some big ones. The pay was measly and the pleasure was enormous, like reuniting with the first girl you had a crush on and resuming your crush. Every Monday morning I sat down and wrote 750 words about whatever I wanted to write about, and the next morning it was in print and being read by bus passengers, patrons of barbershops, hospital patients, diners in cafés, and homeless people hanging out in public libraries. By that time, the American newspaper, like the Broadway theater or organized labor or the American short story, had been reported as near death and the desirable readership had abandoned print and was getting their news via blips of text on mobile devices. Still, a man loves what he loves. If you grow up on the grand hymns of Wesley and Watts and Fanny Crosby, you cannot bear to stand in church and sing choruses that sound like Coke jingles; if you grow up on newspapers, then electronic publishing is a hollow pleasure. I had an editor in Chicago who I enjoyed tormenting with very very long sentences, which he, a newspaper guy, was not well disposed to. I wrote:

  I sit in wonderment at the story of W. Lance Anderson the president of NovaStar Financial in Kansas City who while handing out subprime mortgages to any applicant wearing shoes and a shirt managed to sink the company’s stock from $40 in June to $1.72, meanwhile earning $1.7 million in salary and bonuses, plus $711,386 in deferred compensation, plus more dough in various arrangements that dopes like me can’t quite grasp, and he goes sailing on to his next venture, which may be making purses from dog poop; meanwhile I wonder who would invest in a loan company headed by a man named W. Lance (and does the W stand for Whoopee or Weasel?)—whoever they are, they are cutting back on Christmas gifts and canceling their winter vacations in Daytona Beach in favor of a Holiday Inn in Minot.

  He wrote back: “Couldn’t we break this up?” And he and I had the great pleasure of arguing about it. In electronic publishing, they’re are no editors and if
their are there not very good.

  NEWSPAPERS

  It seems to me, observing the young in coffee shops, that something is missing from their lives, the fine art of holding a newspaper. They sit staring at computer screens, sometimes with wires coming out of their ears, life passing them by as they drift through MySpace, that encyclopedia of the pathetic, and check out a video of a dog dancing the Macarena—it is so lumpen, so sad that nobody has shown them that opening up a newspaper is the key to looking classy and smart. Never mind the bronze-plated stuff about the role of the press in a democracy—a newspaper, kiddo, is about Style.

  Whether you’re sitting or standing, indoors or out, leaning against a hitching post or with your brogans on a desk, a newspaper gives you a whole rich vocabulary of gesture. You open it with a flourish and a ripple of newsprint, your buoyant self-confidence evident in the way you turn the pages with a snap of the wrist, taking in the gray matter swiftly, your eyes dancing over the world’s sorrows and moving on, crinkling the page, snapping it, rolling it, folding the paper in halves and quarters, tucking it under the arm or tapping it against the palm. Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, Jimmy Stewart, all the greats used the newspaper to demonstrate cool. Sitting and staring at the profile of Kerri (“Dreamer of dreams”) Jodhpur, 18, of Muncie, Indiana, and her cat Snowball is not cool.

  A man at a laptop is a man at a desk, a stiff, a drone. Where is the nobility here? He hunches forward, his eyes glaze, and beads of saliva glitter in the corners of his mouth and make their way down his chin as he becomes engrossed in the video of the fisherman falling out of the boat. A newspaper reader, by comparison, is a swordsman, a wrangler, a private eye. Holding a newspaper frees you up to express yourself, sort of like holding a sax did for Coltrane. Just observe a few simple rules:

  1.If you want to make a serious impression, don’t buy one paper, buy three or four. A person walking into Starbucks with four papers folded under his wing is immediately taken for a mogul. If he’s young, he’s a software mogul. If he is unshaven and wearing pajamas under his raincoat, he is an eccentric mogul, perhaps a Mafia kingpin.

  2.Take your sweet time opening the paper. You already know what’s in it, boss man, you only read it so you’ll know how much other people know, so there’s no big rush.

  3.Once you open it, never look up unless someone speaks your name. Don’t be distracted just because a leggy blonde has crossed the room, leaving a trail of cigarette smoke and Chanel No. 5. You’re the actor so let others be the audience, you be the scene.

  4.Scan the front page, check out the headlines, but don’t pore, don’t be a drudge. Be cool. Jump to the sports page, then the comics, then the society page, then editorials. That’s the beauty of the inverted pyramid news story. A glance is usually good enough.

  5.Always rip out a story or two and tuck it in your pocket. Not casually, like it was a recipe for meatballs, but with urgency and purpose. This creates an indelible aura of mystery.

  6.When you’re done with a paper, clap it shut and toss it aside. (You can’t do that with a laptop.) A gesture of dismissal that says, “Feh! Enough of this pettiness! Onward! To the barricades!”

  All of this should take no more than twenty minutes.

  I know a man who is almost my age and so he grew up with ink on his fingers and then, for reasons he couldn’t explain, he switched over to reading online publications and checking out the Times and the Washington Post and Slate and then found Dom.com with streaming video in which a mature Austrian woman with braids tells you what to do. He sits, his eyes locked to hers, as she says, “You vill eat, mein little schweinhund,” and upbraids him for imaginary transgressions. If he reaches for the OFF switch, she screeches at him and a Rottweiler growls low in its throat and so he is a prisoner of his laptop, his days shot. This sort of thing happens all the time. The Internet will eat you alive. With newspapers, you’re in and out, twenty minutes. It’s your life, you choose.

  HEALTH

  I caught part of a radio call-in show the other day on which a vet was fielding questions about Addison’s disease among basset hounds and a cocker spaniel’s hypothyroid problem and what can be done about a bulldog who snores (he needs to lose weight). It was interesting to discover the excellent medical care that dogs have come to expect these days. The vet was herself a dog parent, as she put it, and there was genuine feeling in her voice when she discussed the bassets’ hormonal problems, something I haven’t heard in the debate over health care for humans this summer.

  I have not been a pet parent for twenty years, so perhaps I’m not up to speed here, but back in the day, dogs slept in the garage or on the porch so they could defend the home against socialism, and if they snored, it definitely was their problem and not ours. Ditto hypothyroidism. There was a death panel for that, chaired by Dad.

  Dad grew up on a farm and was not overly sentimental about animals. He did not purchase jewelry for them or talk to them in a high-pitched voice. He would have blanched at the thought that the average cost of a visit to the vet with your cat is now $172. The chance of Dad paying that much to care for Snowball was about the same as Snowball’s chances in hell. But that has all changed, and now the American people shell out upward of $10 billion a year for health care for pets.

  Fine. Not an issue. Nobody called in to the show to suggest that the knee operation on the fourteen-year-old golden retriever (a recent cancer survivor) shows a level of caring far beyond what we extend to three-fourths of the world’s human population. I could have but I don’t care to upset the golden retriever community. Live and let live is my motto, dear reader. If your gerbil Mitzi needs a new heart valve and you’ve got the fifteen grand to spend on it, I am not here to stand in your way. Period.

  And so the summer fades into September. Here on the upper Mississippi we’ve already felt an autumnal chill. I have gone to the State Fair and fed my child her allotment of corn dogs and deep-fried cheese curds and led her through the poultry barn so she knows where the omelet comes from and now it’s time for her to resume science and mathematics and learn the subjunctive mood.

  Here is an example of the subjunctive: Had we known that Americans were so paranoid about public health, we would have packaged health care reform differently and come up with better slogans.

  Perhaps there should be a public pet option.

  There was real sympathy for the parent of the bassets with the adrenal deficiency, whereas our 48 million uninsured citizens (of whom two-thirds come from a family with at least one full-time worker) are merely a big fat statistic, thus far lacking in a poster child. We can sort of imagine the misery of walking into an emergency room with no money, no plastic, no Blue Cross card, and trying to obtain treatment for some ailment that doesn’t involve bone fragments protruding from the skin, but it doesn’t speak to the heart the way an injured dog does.

  Animals love us unconditionally and we love them back, maybe more than we love our neighbors, and that’s just the truth, Ruth. People can be irksome, petty, especially raggedy ones—poverty does not always bring out the best in folks—and that’s why it’s difficult to get people to care about the uninsured.

  If you put a pet option in the health care reform scheme, Americans would be in a bind. It’s one thing to oppose big government taking over from those little mom-and-pop insurance companies, but do you favor throwing Mr. Mittens out the car window when he gets old and feeble and needs an IV because he can’t chew his kibble? You’d have weepy pet parents at town hall meetings waving photographs of kitty cats in need of new kidneys, and finally you’d start to see some empathy. People love their animals, and if we could just agree that everybody in America should receive the same level of care enjoyed by an elderly golden retriever, we could be done with this debate and get ready for the World Series.