The beauty of falls that you walk away from

Garrison Keillor's Podcast

Prairie Home Productions

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

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 22 June 2024

⏱️ 7 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

I fell twice crossing 89th Street, once in the middle of the street, once at the curb. I misjudged the step, crashed down on my hands and knees and chin, and once I walked into a tree branch on the path around the Central Park Reservoir and got plonked on my keister, and each time strangers rushed to my side to ask if I was okay and I said I was and jumped up but now I see these falls were a turning point in my life. Once you come crashing down, there is no longer a need to have a smart opinion about everything; you’re simply part of the human race. Your job is to be a biped rather than a quad. As Scripture says, It is God who has made us, and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.And so long as you can stand up and baa, you can do comedy. I have a good sense of sentence structure and my vocabulary is exemplary. Thanks to my aunts Elsie and Margaret, I speak clearly. They listened to me recite my verse in Sunday school and said, “We could understand every word.” From Ephesians and Ecclesiastes to stand-up comedy is a hop and a jump.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is not a sermon, it's just a fact. Since I cut out alcohol, 22 years ago, I've often awoken in the middle of the night with beautiful
0:26.2	ideas which is a golden gift for a writer better than emeralds and diamonds. Tuesday night, for example, I woke at 3 a.m. next to my
0:40.1	sleeping wife. I rose, I dressed, I slipped out of her hotel room in Minneapolis,
0:47.0	and sat in the lobby with my laptop and started writing a book with a 10-word title about happiness, because I'm a happy man.
1:00.0	I'm qualified.
1:02.0	Last week I did two shows just outside DC, one in Vermont, two serious locations, serious people and I made those people laugh so hard they were glad they
1:19.0	brought an extra pair of pants. I went to Minnesota hoping to solve a Medicare problem that I'd spent
1:27.2	years on the phone about, listening to mind-numbing music on hold,
1:34.0	waiting to talk to some clueless bureaucrat
1:38.0	working from home,
1:40.0	TV blaring in the background, dogs barking.
1:44.0	And out in Minnesota, I went to an office.
1:48.0	I sat across the desk from a human being the way we used to do and he solved my problem in a matter of minutes and he
1:57.6	thanked me for my patience. Life is good. I've been waiting a long time to become as old as I am and it was worth the
2:09.4	weight. You couldn't pay me enough to go back to being young again.
2:14.1	I did dumber things than you'd think possible for a university graduate.
2:19.6	And that's why I excused myself from the jury in New York, paying off a porn star and claiming
2:28.8	it as a business expense. Heck, I've made accounting mistakes too.
2:34.2	But this is the beautiful 3 a.m. idea.
2:38.5	You've got to have some disasters,
2:41.5	the kind you walk away from to notice the bluebird on your shoulder.
2:47.0	My disaster was a series of falls I took walking around Manhattan. I'm 81. I used to have a good
	...

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