Still at home on the radio
Fans of “A Prairie Home Companion” can stop sending Garrison Keillor flowers. The humorist and best-selling author says he’s just fine after recently suffering a mild stroke.
“What I feel is impatience and guilt at accepting sympathy and concern from people that I do not have coming to me,” says Keillor, 67. “You get a lot of potted plants that you’re really not entitled to.
“Just because a guy, you know, spent four days on monitors doesn’t entitle you to a big pot of black-eyed Susans. They should go to people who have real problems.”
The new season of “A Prairie Home Companion” kicked off Saturday with a live broadcast from St. Paul’s Fitzgerald Theater, followed by a meatloaf supper and annual street dance. (The broadcast repeats today at 6 p.m. on KPBX-FM.)
Keillor began the show in July 1974 and has seen it grow to a public radio institution that draws more than 4 million listeners weekly on nearly 600 radio stations nationwide.
He says a couple of friends “made a serious attempt” to get him to retire after the stroke.
“They gave me a beautiful sales pitch. They drew a lovely picture of what it would be like, and I could work on writing books and I could write at my own speed, and I could travel, except I travel now,” Keillor says.
“And the more they described it the more they seemed like they were describing something that would be wonderful for somebody else. And so I said, ‘No, thank you.’ ”
Keillor drove himself to a St. Paul hospital after feeling ill on Labor Day, then was taken by ambulance to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.
He had surgery to repair a heart valve at Mayo in 2001, but his stroke apparently was unrelated.
“Your mouth goes berserk,” he recalls, “as if you’d had four martinis, and it’s numb, as if you’ve gone to the dentist and had four martinis.”
Keillor says he “crossed a line in human experience” when he gave himself an injection of blood thinner in his belly when he got home from the hospital – which impressed his 11-year-old daughter.
“It was like the sideshow at the State Fair when I was a kid, you know,” he explains.
He says a Mayo speech therapist told him “the way you get your normal speech back is by using your voice. So you just use it. Go back to work and pretty soon you’ll be back to normal.”
“I’ve been pretending to be normal for a long time,” he adds.
The birthday bunch
Director Arthur Penn is 87. Actor Wilford Brimley is 75. Singer/actor Meat Loaf is 62. Singer/actor Shaun Cassidy is 51. Actor Patrick Muldoon is 41. Actress Gwyneth Paltrow is 37. Rapper Lil’ Wayne is 27. Singer Avril Lavigne is 25.