I feel strangely elated about the Prairie Home Companion shows coming up this week, think they may be the best we’ve ever done, which is odd for an almost-83-year-old guy to think, plus which I’m a Minnesotan and elation doesn’t come naturally to us. We are a very calm people. But I had a phenomenal week of writing, thanks to my new discovery that 3 a.m. is prime time for me. There’s a crazy intuitivity at that hour. What some people hoped to get from hallucinogens, some of us get from lack of sleep.

So Wednesday night the gang takes to the Strathmore in Bethesda, Maryland, and Saturday night we do Tanglewood in Lenox, Massachusetts. I wish we were doing Carnegie Hall and the Hollywood Bowl and the Minnesota State Fair, but maybe next year.

We have three great singers: Ellie Dehn, Christine DiGiallonardo, and Heather Masse, for whom I wrote three new verses for the Star-Spangled Banner (the audience will sing the old one), and some new verses for the Hallelujah Chorus, and for Ellie, a Met Opera soprano, I wrote new words for La donna è mobile and O sole mio. Music director Richard Dworsky gets to play opera, folk, country, Grateful Dead, and blues, plus sing the Rhubarb jingle. The blues harpist Howard Levy joins the band. SFX man Fred Newman will do his one-man Led Zeppelin impression plus Clair de lune played on a jackhammer and sung by ducks, and a great deal more. Erica Rhodes will talk about her tortured childhood trying to become Clara in the Nutcracker.

Tim Russell and Sue Scott return in a half-dozen roles. Guy Noir is in northern Canada trying to save a man who calls from a pay phone in the woods somewhere in the U.S. where he is set upon by an ex-girlfriend as he runs out of quarters. Dusty and Lefty look for Lefty’s love Evelyn Beebalo, guided by a sarcastic Siri on Lefty’s saddlephone. There are commercials for Bertha’s, the Catchup Advisory Board, Coffee, the Professional Organization of English Majors, Beebopareebop Rhubarb, and of course Powdermilks. I’ll do the news from the little town that time forgot and I’ll also get to sing Brokedown Palace and Calling My Children with the women and a song about sweet corn.

If I’d known it was going to be such a good show, I’d have lobbied for public radio to carry it, but NPR has moved on and I don’t know anybody in television, so we’ll just be thankful for what we have. I’m a happy man, out working the road, writing a last novel So Long, Wobegon, and I hope to inspire other octogenarians: it doesn’t need to grind to a halt, sometimes it can be better than ever. GK

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