OXFORD, Miss. – Pacing back-and-forth near the edge of the stage as if he were strolling along the shoreline of Lake Wobegon, humorist and radio host Garrison Keillor doled out enough homespun musings and folksy music to make his audience forget all about the chilly rain falling outside.
Keillor, host of Minnesota Public Radio’s variety show “A Prairie Home Companion,” was the speaker for the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College spring convocation Wednesday night at the Gertrude C. Ford Center for the Performing Arts. For about an hour, he delighted the audience by basically re-creating his radio show onstage.
He expressed delight at visiting Ole Miss, noting that he read a lot about the South and its rebels while growing up in Minnesota.
“My nose was always in a book,” he recalled. “Nowadays, they call this autism, but back then, they called it good sense.”
Dressed in a dark suit and battered red athletic shoes, Keillor regaled the crowd with tales of a Midwestern Lutheran couple on vacation, the talk at Lake Wobegon’s Bon Marché Beauty Salon, his own childhood family vacations and a middle-of-the-night fishing excursion with his Uncle Jack. The hilarity started quickly, with Keillor spinning a tale of how his Aunt Evelyn’s funeral collided, literally, with a gathering of 24 Lutheran pastors on a pontoon boat.
He was soon joined onstage by Richard Dworsky, music director for “A Prairie Home Companion,” on piano, and then by Heather Masse, a songwriter and member of the popular folk group The Wailin’ Jennys who frequently performs on the show. Focusing on a theme of love in honor of Valentine’s Day, Keillor and Masse sprinkled the show with duets by a broad range of artists, from Ella Fitzgerald to Elvis Presley.
Chancellor Dan Jones opened the program with a welcome, and Douglass Sullivan-Gonzalez, dean of the honors college, presented the 2012 Barksdale Awards to Cara Thorne of Toronto and Yi Wei of Starkville, both Ole Miss sophomores.
“It is a pleasure to be here among you rebels,” Keillor crooned at the end of the show to thunderous applause. “I hope one day ‘A Prairie Home Companion’ will be done from this stage.”
Visit the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College for more information.
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