News from Lake Wobegon

It was a quiet week.  ​Pastor Liz takes a group of teenagers on a Boundary Waters canoe trip, leads a "Kumbaya" sing-along, and tells them about her favorite boyfriend.

To be clear, this is the next to last monologue from Garrison Keillor before he retires of host of A Prairie Home Companion.  Actually, by the time I post this, the last show was broadcast in its entirety earlier today.  Actually, to even be fully accurate, as I described this morning, the last show was done live yesterday.  Still, though, for those listening along to these News from Lake Wobegon posts alone -- one more to go after this...

And for those who listened to Garrison Keillor's final broadcast, a few comments about how it compared to the actual live show:

They did a lot of editing, not just cutting things out of the three-hour show, to get it down to the normal two hours, but shifted the order of sketches and songs.  (The "Life of Cowboys" sketch, for instance, and the following song were performed near the very end of the show.  On the radiocast, they were in the first half-hour.)  Also, the chat with President Obama had applause at the beginning and end, but it was actually recorded the day before with no audience around.

Then, after the broadcast ended, and the show signed off, they added a sort of bonus "after show."  This consisted of material from the pre-show, some of the material that had been cut from the live show, and the encore. There was about an hour and 10 minutes of all that, so they didn't use everything  -- just about 20 minutes -- but I'm glad that so much of it was broadcast, in particular the encore.

Okay, again, here's the News from Lake Wobegon from last week, the second-to-last...