The beautiful winding road

Garrison Keillor's Podcast

Prairie Home Productions

Society & Culture, Fiction, Comedy Fiction, Improv, Comedy

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 12 October 2024

⏱️ 8 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This is one of the happiest summers of my very long life. My wife installed WhatsApp on my phone and it dings and I pick up and she talks to me from the wine country of Portugal where she’s hiking with her brother and his wife, on their way to a baptism and pig roast. Sometimes my daughter comes on and says, “Make me laugh,” so I tell her about the woman at Yellowstone Park who was chased by a bear and the park rangers arrested her for running with a bear behind. She laughs.I’m an old man, I have no ambition whatsoever but I love my work. I do 90 minutes of stand-up, I go back to the hotel and work on my novel, and in the morning I repeat it. The audience laughs a lot and then I have hours of pure silence occasionally interrupted by the voice of the woman I love lying in her hotel room in a heat wave in Portugal and recounting her days’ adventures. Or my little girl needing a joke. So a woman was hit by a car and lay in the street bleeding and someone yelled, “Call a priest!” The woman said, “No, I’m Unitarian.” Someone yelled, “Then call a math teacher.”

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The The beautiful winding Road of August.
0:25.5	I went up the coast of Maine last week and came across a wonderful little cafe and it was so good I pulled out my pad and pen and sat writing for a couple
0:39.3	hours. I like to write with people nearby but not involved with me personally.
0:47.0	The waitress was all business.
0:50.0	She greeted me by saying, yeah, I asked if they served lunch. She said, yeah, take a seat.
0:57.0	I'd had a bad encounter with a lobster roll the day before.
1:03.7	So I ordered a garden salad and a grilled cheese.
1:09.9	She said, with chicken or crab?
1:11.5	I said, with chicken or crab, I said crab.
1:13.8	Crab is not lobster.
1:17.5	The salad was fresh, greens, tomato chunks, slices of cucumber, crutons, but fresh, not shipped in cellophane from
1:27.7	Croatian.
1:30.0	And the sandwich was just fine.
1:33.6	And so was the blueberry pie ole moon.
1:37.6	What I loved, though, wasn't the food, but the ambience. I sat in the dark interior looking out an open door to a bright sunny
1:48.1	boardwalk and marina and the The customers were stocky people, good eaters, in shorts, and sneakers, a chorus of children's
2:08.4	voices from a kitty area about 30 feet away.
2:13.6	Kids eat fast, and then they want to hang with other kids.
2:17.9	So they were busy jousting and teasing and squealing,
2:22.2	playing with puzzles,
2:23.8	while the grown-ups sat at tables and conversed.
2:28.8	And I sat looking at the door,
	...

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