(Holland, MI 10/8/2021) – Keillor & Company – A Prairie Home Holiday will be visiting Holland, MI Sunday December 12th at 7:30pm at the Holland Civic Center Place for an evening of stand-up, storytelling, audience song, and poetry starring Garrison Keillor and featuring pianist Dan Chouinard and soprano Prudence Johnson. Ticket prices are $54 / $44 / $34 and go on sale Friday October 15th at 10:00am EST.
There are sung sonnets, limericks and musical jokes, and the thread that runs through it is the beauty of growing old. Despite the inconvenience, old age brings the contentment of LESS IS MORE. Your mistakes and big ambitions behind you, nothing left to prove, and small things give you great pleasure because that’s what’s left. (I was unhappy in college it was a requirement for an intellectual, but then I went into show business and discovered that people won’t pay to be made unhappy, their kids will do it for free.”) There is the News from Lake Wobegon, a town booming with new entrepreneurs, makers of artisanal firewood and gourmet meatloaf, breeders of composting worms, and dogs trained to do childcare. But some things endure, such as the formations of the Living Flag on Main street, citizens in tight formation wearing red, white or blue caps, and Mr. Keillor among them, standing close to old neighbors, Myrtle Krebsback (“Truckstop”) and Julie Christensen (“Bruno The Fishing Dog”) and Clint Bunsen. And an acapella sing-along with the audience singing from memory an odd medley of patriotic songs, pop standards, hymns, and ending with the national anthem.
Garrison Keillor did “A Prairie Home Companion” for forty years, wrote fiction and comedy, invented a town called Lake Wobegon where all the children are above average, event though he himself grew up evangelical in a small separatist flock where all the children expected the imminent end of the world. He’s busy in retirement having written a memoir and a book of limericks and is at work on a musical and a Lake Wobegon screenplay, and he continues to do “The Writers Almanac” send out daily to subscribers (free).
Dan Chouinard is a St. Paul-based honky-tonk pianist, concert soloist and accompanist, street accordionist, sing-along enabler, Italian and French teacher, and bicycling vagabond. He’s been writer and host of a number of live history-with-music shows broadcast on Minnesota Public Radio and Twin cities Public Television. He played on a dozen live broadcasts of A Prairie Home Companion plus a h alf dozen APHC cruises, and served as rehearsal pianist for Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, and Lindsay Lohan on the 2005 movie. He’s featured on a number of recordings with APHC regulars Peter Ostroushko (RIP), Prudence Johnson, and Maria Jette.
Prudence Johnson’s long and happy career as a singer, writer, and teacher has landed her on the musical theater stage, in two feature films ( A River Runs Through It, A Prairie Home Companion), on a national radio show (several long stints on A Prairie Home Companion), and on concert stages across North America and occasionally Europe. She has released more than a dozen recordings, including albums dedicated to the music of Hoagy Carmichael and Greg Brown, and a collection of international lullabies.