If history is any indication, be ready to be surprised with ‘Prairie Home Companion’

The live broadcast of “A Prairie Home Companion” at the Spokane Arena is Saturday afternoon and maybe – just maybe – host Garrison Keillor has actually written some of the show.

“He starts thinking about this, really, about Thursday,” Tim Russell, the show’s man of many voices, said in a phone interview. “And he writes a bunch of scripts by Friday night, and we gather and do a quick run-through.”

Or as Keillor himself once told us, when we asked him why he didn’t have the show written yet: “You know, it’s only Thursday.”

That was during the “Prairie Home Companion” visit to Pullman in 2006. But the same principle applies to this show, presented by Spokane Public Radio.

Russell said this show, like all of the others, will really begin to take shape sometime in the wee hours of Saturday morning.

“He (Keillor) gets an idea of how to modify it and then he rewrites everything overnight,” Russell said. “So then the scripts are all different, sometimes entirely new, sometimes entirely scrapped. So we get those about two hours before show time on Saturday.”

So Russell and fellow voice artist Sue Scott only have two hours to rehearse?

If they’re lucky.

“He’ll change things about an hour before the show and sometimes even during the show,” said Russell. “… And sometimes, we just run out and he says, ‘Just follow me.’”

This kind of working-without-a-net style has been known to strike terror into the occasional guest performer.

“They get panicked at the live aspect of it,” said Russell.

But not him and Scott.

“We don’t think about it,” he said. “We’re sort of in tune with (Keillor’s) brain and so we just sort of know where he’s going with certain things.

“And our own special skills are radio acting, which is, we know where to fill in the blanks and make it sound real. We try to make it in the moment.

“It’s fun. It’s a kick for us.”

For the ultimate in working-without-a-net excitement, nothing beats Keillor’s own signature monologue, the news from Lake Wobegon.

“I make notes for it throughout the week and I jot down ideas,” he said in 2006. “And when I get closer to Saturday I try to connect them.

“You go out and improvise from what you remember of what you have written down over the past week. It’s a very simple trick. There’s nothing difficult about it.”

Yeah, well, not difficult for him.

Keillor has an incredibly fertile creative mind and its open question whether anybody else could pull this off week after week.

That question actually arose last fall, in the wake of a mild stroke he suffered during the show’s off-season. Some friends tried to talk him into retiring by describing how wonderful life would be with all that time to write and travel.

“And the more they described it the more they seemed like they were describing something that would be wonderful for somebody else,” Keillor, 67, told the Associated Press at the time. “And so I said, ‘No thank you.’”

The retirement idea has even come up in a jocular fashion on the show itself, with a character playing an airy young replacement host.

“All we want to do is bring the pace up,” the new “host” tells Keillor. “Make it more interactive. Bring it to a point where people under 50 are aware of it.”

Yet Russell is convinced that Keillor will continue (“he just loves doing it”) – and it’s a good thing, too.

“Without him, there is no ‘Prairie Home Companion,’ as far as I’m concerned,” said Russell.

The Spokane show, the first here since 1998, will feature frequent musical guests Robin and Linda Williams and singer Andra Suchy.

As for the rest of the show? It’s not exactly written yet.

To find out, tune in tomorrow at 3 p.m. on KPBX-FM, 91.1 (replayed Sunday at 6 p.m.).

Or better yet, buy a ticket for the show. There are still some left.