American Radio Company of the Air; 1991-02-23; Part 3

Golders and her naked breasts split there in two and lying by the parking meter. And the hand holding the sheaf of wheat little crowd gathered on Wednesday morning to look at her where she lay on the sidewalk, the usual men, you know, and parkas who stand around with their hands in their pockets and say the obvious, you know, the usual old guys in town, if you dug a hole in the street, there'd be a bunch of guys stand around and look down at it. So, you know, it's dark down there. And that's dirt there, and if you shoveled out a bunch of that, why there'd be more dirt underneath that dirt there, that dirt there, dirt and rocks, mainly dirt, some rocks, just guys standing around looking at her and saying he used her. I don't think they're going to put her back together again. It just seemed like such a tragic note for our

town. It just seemed like such a. Such a comment, but we weren't sure what it meant, you know, did it just mean that somebody was lucky that she hadn't fallen on them or or did it say something about us? Was it some other kind of of omen? Clarence Bunson stood and looked at it and he said, you know, he said they'd never put up another one like that, because if you did that nowadays, somebody would object to it and then you'd have to file a moral impact study. No, they never do that again. Not in this town. What did it mean? A naked woman fall and broken in the month of February on our sidewalk. Did it say something about eroticism in our town?

We're never noted for eroticism, not even in July and in February. We can go for weeks without thinking about it. And when we do think about it, we don't think about it at the same time, you know, which is worth. I'm going too fast for you, let me know, OK? I mean, fatality has never been a problem in my town. Half the people are Catholics. And beyond that, my people are my people are manure spreaders. By nature, we we make fertility. We're hardworking people. We never rest fertility. We've always taken care of that. It's fun, which is a problem in my town. Where to find it and then how to have it once you find it fun has always been what we're short on, especially in February fertility.

We've got fertility by the horns. We don't need any more of it. But there isn't a lot of fun in Lake Wobegon in the month of February. Just there isn't very much I'd like to think it's because I'm not there, but, uh. But I'm just one of those guys, you know, standing around with their hands in their pockets, same as all of the other. There just isn't a lot of fun there. In February, I'm trying to think of some here and I can't. People get so drunk in Lake Wobegon in the month of February and March, you just never seen the like. We like to think in America that small towns are sort of an outpost of morality and maybe they are so a myth anyway. But I live in Manhattan, which is the seat of American corruption and degradation in Manhattan.

You go into bars and people order Perrier and it's a question of whether you should have a little chunk of lime in it or not. People going to bars in Manhattan and they order prune juice. I mean, an orange juice. If somebody in a bar in Manhattan orders one martini, there's sort of a crowd gathers around and people stand there and reminisce about that. But out in Lake Wobegon, people go into dim places, the sidetrack tap in the month of February, and they hammer themselves on the head until they think down, they go down. That's what people do in my town in February, not to put too fine a point on it in those villages on the coast of Norway, those fishing sailing villages in their in their dialect, they have hundreds of words for different kinds of waves that look different and act different on a boat. Their language is shaped to their culture.

And in Lake Wobegon, we have hundreds of words for drunk. We have a different one for everybody in town. So you can have your own. I don't mean to moralize about these people, but it's the fact people I've never seen people drink so hard as in Lake Wobegon in February. Go in there and watch them for a while. After a while, I mean, they don't look that bad. If you spend time with those old guys in the bar, I mean, you walk in at first and they look kind of kind of degraded and disgusting. But you sit there for a while and then after a while, they look a lot better and they make more sense. It takes a while, but I sit there with them for a while, and after a while they seem, you know, kind of reasonable people, more or less like myself. Not a lot of fun in February in my town.

And that was why Clint Bunson, this last week on Wednesday morning decided to come down to Dallas, Texas. You came down for no reason other than that. It was February. And he he didn't come then he'd have to stay there. He came on one of those cheap tickets. He came. He really came because of that sculpture that fell down on the sidewalk, he stood in that group of men with their hands in their pockets and they and he looked down and he heard Clarence say that they'd never put up one of those again, because if they did, somebody would would object to it. And he looked at that broken, beautiful woman lying in the cold on the sidewalk. And they thought to himself, by God, I'm going to go, it was a ticket that his brother in law, Alan, had gotten.

It's one of those cheap tickets. It was seventy nine dollars roundtrip from Minneapolis to Dallas. It was one of those tickets where you have to leave on an odd numbered day and you have to return 36 hours later with your suitcase in your left hand. It was a complicated thing, but his brother in law, Alan, had gotten this thing about three months ago and then his reason for going to Dallas had sort of evaporated. And he'd been trying to sell this ticket ever since. It was a cheap ticket. But Alan is a cheap guy and. Seventy nine dollars per day. The idea of wasting it because this was nonrefundable non rearrange all this was a cheap ticket. So his price was down to 50 dollars. And at that Klint jumped on it. Cabin fever, just cabin fever so bad. So bad, he works down there at the garage alongside his brother Clarence, the Bunson garage, and the customers are always the same

because this is a town, Lake Wobegon, where where all the Catholics drive Chevys and all the Lutherans drive Fords and they've got the Ford Agency. And so the people you see are the people you see on Sunday morning, same old customers. Few people drive Hondas in my town, but we watch them pretty closely. Came down because his cabin fever and it just he was bored. He's been working with his brother Clarence for so long, his brother all these years. Know them so long, they finish each other's sentences now came down because his wife, Irene, is starting to develop what Clint calls Swedish tendencies, the urge to constantly rearrange, to straighten, to fix, to move things, to adjust things. The woman gets into bed at night like a letter getting into an envelope.

She slides in. The bedspread is straight across her chest. She lies with her arms. That is like a letter going into an envelope. And then the flap comes down and it's sealed and the letter says, Thank you very much, but not tonight, Sophie. So that's the question. Oh, he's got cabin fever so bad. Fifty six years old and drinking doesn't a museum anymore. Clint And besides, he was mayor for so long that he can't walk into the sidetrack tap anymore and sit and talk to these guys. They look at him with narrowed eyes because he was mayor back when they got old and. They blame him for that, so he got on the plane and came down to Dallas, he had to fly by way of Salt Lake City. In Salt Lake City, the security men stopped him as he went through the X-ray

machine because he was whistling La Bamba. He didn't think about it, but they're awfully strict with us Minnesotans coming through security because we look guilty to begin with. Californians go through with swords and hammers and crowbars for security, but Minnesotans look a little sheepish. They stop us for from ballpoint pen. He was taken off to a room for questioning. He was sat down. They asked him where he was going, Dallas. He said, why are you going? I don't know if. They said, are you under medication? You said, no, no. They said, have you been depressed lately? Well, he knew it was going to be trouble, but he was brought up to tell the truth. And so he said, yeah, it's February. And so he missed the plane to Dallas. He had to pay 439 dollars

to get down here, but it was worth it to him. He's a stubborn man. He got on the plane in Salt Lake City. He noticed that he was the only guy who had checked luggage. That's another thing about us, Minnesotan's, is that we see the signs in the airport and they say limit one carry on bag per person and it can be no larger than a Kleenex box. And so we check our luggage and everybody else gets on the plane with five, six bags, huge garment bags the size of water buffalo. They come on, they squeeze them up in the overhead compartments. You go down to a baggage claim area by the carousel an hour later after the flight comes in. Those are just Minnesota people waiting around everybody else. Everybody else is gonna walk up and down the line, ask them where they're from and OK, Rebecca Beltrami Batton, Bigstone, those are all Minnesota people waiting around for the baggage.

Came down to Dallas, waited for his baggage. It was late afternoon. And he walked around town. Just walked and walked, you spend four hundred and thirty nine dollars, you don't go to sleep, you know, you want it to count for something one night. And Dallas. He walked around downtown, there was a strange open area right just west of downtown. No streets, no buildings, just grass and dirt and the freeways overhead, the freeways on pedestals. Acres of open land, their cars watching by overhead, going someplace and underneath this big, lonely, empty area. The West. He walked downtown, all these beautiful glass buildings, each of them with sort of lighting displays and rims of the light green and blue and white lights outlining designs

like sculpture was like nobody was in there, that these were just made for beauty. It was getting on towards twilight. He walked along through downtown. And in the space of about ten minutes, he saw 30 of the most beautiful women, women who looked as if being beautiful was no great effort for them. It was just something that they did. As a part of their lives, he walked through these immense, beautiful buildings and then he headed out of downtown into an area that was more like Lake Wobegon, little used car lots and auto repair shops and welding supply, all these little one storey buildings that never had architects designed by carpenters who walked through there. And there were bars in there. I was getting on kind of late at night on Basehead Blues in the front window.

He couldn't hear the music thundering out and he could see bodies rattling around, flinging themselves around inside. It was really loud, but he thought to himself. If I were going to just go to church, I could have stayed home. He went down, he went dead, and there was a saxophone player standing on the stage which was up in the front. The sax player was playing at a guitar and a bass piano and drummer and people dancing in front and tables full of people on a bar along the side and a pool table in the back. Loud music. He found a little stool at the bar and he sat down there. He ordered a beer. He sat and listened to the music. It was terrifically loud. There was on the front of the guitar and it said, if this music is too loud, you are too old. Well, it's the truth he sat there, the beer came at cost three dollars and 50 cents, and there was a four dollar cover charge.

He was going to ask what a cover charge is, but it didn't seem like the right time to bring it up. So, yeah, so he paid he said there was a little wedge of lime and that right in the top of the beer bottle, he placed that down. He wasn't going to complain about that. And he. Drank the beer, it was pretty good he was going to just stay and have one beer, but then it started raining, so he stayed and had some more. It rained for a long time. A woman sat down next to him and after a while she said, Where are you from? He said, Minnesota. That's the kind of people we are, we don't even lie in strange bars, Minnesota, he said the light did not go on. And her eyes. She said, oh, she tried to think of something and she couldn't, and she turned to the guy on her left and then the band stopped playing the

peaceful moment and beautiful moment when the music stops. He sat drinking his beer, listening to the rain, smelling chili somewhere. And an old black man got up on the stand to play. He played the harmonica and the piano player was playing with him. It's an old black man with a big belly and with glasses so thick you couldn't see his eyes. He looked like sort of a black robot standing there. He played the harmonica and he sang in this princely voice. It was such a wonderful moment, it was worth 439 dollars. You'd remember it forever. He smoked. Azeez, as he sang, drew the smoke down deep and he blew it out. He was too nearsighted to see where he dropped his boots. He just dropped them down and patrons would come over and step on him for everything terrible had happened to this man.

Everything, everything you could imagine. Whiskey and unfaithful women and the boll weevil and poverty, tuberculosis, everything miserable and life had come down on this man. Everything. The only things he didn't think about were where maybe lower back pain and poor gas mileage. But everything else. He was February in person. And yet it was majestic and so wonderful, he sang, I've got the blues, but I won't feel bad always the sun's going to shine in my back door someday. And right at that moment, Clint Bunson made up his mind. He's going to go back to Lake Wobegon and he is going to by hook or by crook, get a statue of a naked woman and put it up on the corner of Bunson Motors.

Some way he's going to put it up there. And if anybody complains about it. If anybody complains, he is going to tell them, that's to remind us when the sun doesn't shine, that someday it will. That's the news from Lake Wobegon. We're all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average. There's a great old tune, Duke Ellington made this arrangement of another Texas tune, and here's Lynn Thigpen to sing for. Those of the Rio Grande

rose over the border, one working hand in hand will be the previous side room. Have the right and right. Oh, I got your love, man. You claim I made. Rio

Grande. Thank you, Lynn Thigpen. We've had such a good time here with you in Dallas at the Bronco Bowl. We got to come out and say good night here. I want to thank the Dixie Chicks for being with us. Mr. Johnny Gimble here. They're going to take us off thanks to Rob Fisher, the coffee club orchestra, the Austin Richards News. Len Thigpen, Mr. Tom Keith back here on the sound effects. Our show tonight was written by a manual transmission with Ken Lazebnik and Russ Ringsak, produced by Christine Tschida.

Our production manager steve Kelm. Technical Direction by Scottrade with Brian Chilian, John Cayler and Alan Rickman. Thanks for the music from the Harbord Collection. The University of Minnesota, the Library of Congress, thanks to our crew, thanks to our ranchers Russell Warren and Gary Fagan and Andy Stern. Thanks to the folks here at KTAR AFM in Dallas, the American Radio Company's principal sponsors the American Booksellers Association, additional funding provided by this public radio station. I show next week comes to you live from Chicago, Alice Coliban with

the Country Club Orchestra, the Acme vocals as well. Thanks again, Mr. Johnny Gimble, Johnny Gimble, both the Dixie Chicks. That's our show for tonight, but CNN, quick, goodnight, everybody. Goodnight now. This is the American Public Radio Network.