Live at the Fabulous Fox Saturday,
June 18 at 4:45 p.m.
$68, $58, $38
314-534-1111, or in person at the Fabulous Fox Box
Office.
St. Louis, January 28, 2016– The Fabulous Fox Theatre
proudly presents host/producer Garrison Keillor & friends live at theFox Theatre
for the popular weekly radio broadcast, A Prairie Home Companion. This
performance will be the last time Garrison Keillor will host A Prairie Home Companion
in St. Louis.
If you showed up on July 6, 1974, at
the Janet Wallace Auditorium at Macalester College in Saint Paul and plunked
down your $1 admission (50 cents for kids) to attend the very first broadcast
of A Prairie Home Companion, you were in select company.
There were about 12 people in the
audience. But those in attendance thought there were worse ways to spend a
Saturday afternoon, so Garrison Keillor and the APHC team went on to produce
close to 500 live shows in the first 10 years alone.
There were broadcasts from this
venue and that, until March 4, 1978, when the show moved to The World Theater,
a lovely, crumbling building that was one plaster crack away from the wrecking
ball. (Now fully renovated and renamed The Fitzgerald, it is
the show’s home base.)
In June of 1987, APHC ended for a
while. Garrison thought it was a good idea at the time, but only two years
later, the show was back, based in New York and called American Radio
Company of the Air. But there’s no place like home. So in 1992, it was back
to Minnesota and, soon after, back to the old name:A Prairie Home Companion.
There has been plenty of adventure
in the past 40-plus years — broadcasts from Canada, Ireland, Scotland, England,
Germany, Iceland and almost every one of the 50 states; wonderful performers,
little-known and world-renowned; standing ovations and stares of bewilderment.
We’ve missed planes, coped with lost
luggage, dodged swooping bats and hungry mosquitoes, plodded through blizzards,
and flown by the seat of our pants.
Today, A Prairie Home
Companion is heard by 4 million listeners each week on nearly 700 public
radio stations, online, and on the American Forces Networks, SiriusXM
Radio, Radio New Zealand, and KPRG in Guam.
Garrison recalls, “When the show
started, it was something funny to do with my friends, and then it became an
achievement that I hoped would be successful, and now it’s a good way of life.”
A Prairie Home Companion is produced by Prairie Home Productions, and
distributed nationwide by American Public Media. The program is underwritten by
Ford.
About Garrison Keillor
Garrison Keillor was born in 1942 in
Anoka, Minnesota, and began his radio career as a freshman at the University of
Minnesota, from which he graduated in 1966. He went to work for Minnesota
Public Radio in 1969, and on July 6, 1974, he hosted the first broadcast
of A Prairie Home Companion in St. Paul. Today, some 4 million
listeners on more than 600 public radio stations coast to coast and beyond tune
in to the show each week.
Keillor has been honored with
Grammy, ACE, and George Foster Peabody awards, the National Humanities Medal,
and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His many books
include Lake Wobegon Days, The Book of Guys, Pilgrims:
A Wobegon Romance, Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny, and The
Keillor Reader (Viking). He is the host of the daily program The Writer’s Almanac and
the editor of several anthologies of poetry, most recently,Good Poems:
American Places (Viking).
In 2006, Keillor played himself in
the movie adaptation of his show, a film directed by Robert Altman. He has two
grandsons and in 2007, he opened an independent bookstore, Common Good Books,
in St. Paul, the city where he and his wife and daughter make their home.
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