MOORHEAD — "A Prairie Home Companion" got off to an inauspicious start with only 12 people seeing the first version of Garrison Keillor’s radio show in the summer of 1974. Fifty years later a bigger crowd turned out to see the writer and a version of the former public radio stage show in Moorhead, the town that gave Keillor the show’s name. About 750 people came out to Bluestem Amphitheater Thursday to see and hear the show, which was not recorded for rebroadcast.
The location is a few miles south of A Prairie Home Cemetery, whch the writer was introduced to during a poetry reading in the early 1970s. The crowd was small, but sat on Keillor’s every word, laughing and —when prodded — singing along. With 750 people, the space was only about a 1⁄4 full and significantly smaller than the 2,441 that came out when Keillor brought another version of the show to Bluestem in 2010.
The size of the crowd didn't seem to bother the 82-year-old Keillor, who instructed those in the general admission bench seats to come down to the reserved seats. “If it’s a bad show, you’ll meet someone new,” he said. Finding jokes in his gloomy demeanor was in full effect Thursday night.
“I was not brought up for enjoyment. I was brought up for guilt and shame,” he said. “Part of growing up in the Midwest is being taught you are insignificant.
We believe in suffering so you know where the bottom was.” While the audience cheered on his observations of practical Lutheran Midwest.
