Garrison Keillor

I half expected Guy Noir to walk in at any moment as Laurel and I sidled up to the bar at The Stockyards for a saloon stop

before heading to see the other Guy, the Big Guy, Garrison Keillor. I thought I'd need my BFF from Minneapolis to help translate, but as soon as he came on, it was like he was speaking right to me. Right to everybody, really. The man's a genius. Witty. Pithy. Pretty cheeky. He takes experiences we all have had and turns them into stories and songs we all know the words to. We laughed. We cried. We sang. Maybe it's weird for a girl like me to like this guy. It's such an old-fashioned thing to do, sitting around on a weekend, listening to him on the radio. Sometimes I imagine I'm back in those times before TV, sitting with my family, surrounding the radio, watching it, wondering what the characters look like - the private eye, the sultry bartender, the librarian, the cowboy, the mom on the other end of the phone. But I'm not very old-fashioned. I can't cook. Or sew. I'm a really bad hostess. Pearls look funny on me. So even though I've been married forever and I love the whole mom thing, that's probably where my old-fashionedness stops. But tonight as I gazed around the old, old Celebrity Theater in the round, smelling like Depends and baby powder, looking like Skate World from seventh grade with the worn out Vegas carpet, I realized - we've all seen better days. I'm glad I was there to hear all about them.

Not ready to stop the Minnesota/Arizona good times rolling, Laurel and I laughed our way over to see another long-time Keillor fan, Anne, at her Knockers Up place, where I started to imagine things again, like seeing Garrison and the definitely not old-fashioned Rusty Warren hanging around a kitchen table in Lake Wobegone, going at it for a round or two.