Wild Seed in the Big Apple

By John Skow

Alas, Powdermilk Bagels, the brand that gives shy New Yorkers the strength to jump over subway turnstiles, was not among the sponsors. Garrison Keillor, the wandering Minnesota minstrel whose Prairie Home Companion variety show on public radio told tales of gentle eccentricity in a hard-to-find Midwestern hamlet called Lake Wobegon, says he has put shyness behind him. Just as well. Keillor, whose new American Radio Company of the Air fills the old P.H.C. Saturday-evening slot (6 to 8 p.m. EST), is now a New Yorker himself, an unstrained and wildly germinating seed in the Big Applesauce. Like all Gotham residents, he told listeners on A.R.C.'s first broadcast, he tries to project an image of aggressive lunacy as he walks the streets, by muttering constantly to himself.

Works fine, he reported. Not only do muggers edge away nervously, but Keillor thinks up a lot of good material as he mumbles. Thus the new show: recycled mugger-repellent. What kind of new show? Some comedy, centered more in the present than the nostalgic P.H.C. was, he said a few days before the first broadcast. But mostly "fine, classic American music; music to make people throw babies in the air." Tunes for the old show, which he closed with a teary farewell broadcast in June 1987 (tearier second and third farewells followed, and a fourth is plotted for next June), tended to be guitar-based bluegrass and country, not counting the occasional trombone choir playing Lapland milking songs.

A classy 16-piece orchestra, no less, anchors the A.R.C. series, most of whose broadcasts will come from the Majestic Theater in Brooklyn, a spectacularly decayed old burlesque house belonging to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The first broadcast detonated with a finger-snapping zum-bum-ooo-ooo singing group called True Image, headed uptown with show tunes swung elegantly by soprano Eileen Farrell, the diva who stops being 70 when she opens her mouth, then went gloriously low-down with Jelly Roll Morton tunes by pianist Butch Thompson, the fine St. Paul barrelhouser from the P.H.C. days. Flying babies filled the air.

Was this just P.H.C. at the Plaza? Sure. Maybe. No. There was, of course, a rambling dispatch from Lake Wobegon (Pastor Ingqvist, Keillor reported with approval, shocked his congregation at Thanksgiving by urging them to "sin boldly"). Tom Keith, P.H.C.'s sound-effects wizard, was on hand to provide, among other arcanities, the splash of George Washington's silver dollar falling short into the Rappahannock. The show's funniest sketch, a serial, produced a new star, actress Ivy Austin. She plays Gloria, big-city girl, . whose boyfriend (as she confesses endlessly to her hairdresser) wants her to give up everything (a shoe-box apartment), move to Seattle and marry him. Keillor says that when he started to write the script, his hero was a plucky male writer who moved to Manhattan, but Gloria, the archetypal tough, yearning New York woman, muscled in and took over.

What next? Minnesota Public Radio, which produces A.R.C., has committed to a run of four shows, then six weeks of P.H.C. repeats, then 16 more live shows. Keillor hopes that A.R.C. will broadcast weekly after that, carried largely by its troupe of musicians and actors. "My idea is to make myself redundant," he says. This could be awkward. To the unpersuaded who couldn't stand P.H.C., he has always been redundant. But millions of others, who interrupted wedding receptions, marital quarrels and dinner parties to listen, are unlikely to accept substitutes.