28

You’re The Top

I WAS SET OUT ON the writing road at the age of fourteen, handing a story to Red at the Linotype, reading the galley, watching the flatbed press slap out the Heralds and bundle them up and stayed on it, reading the New Yorker Mr. Anderson gave me, and reading Roger Angell’s letter accepting “Local Family Makes Son Happy,” and five years later the radio show appeared and gradually the work got to be fun. You start out with ambition and perseverance and with good luck and a boost from friends you get some outlandish good breaks and eventually, Lord willing, you may find yourself in the land of delight. “Sounds of Sickness” was a delight: to vandalize an anthem of idealism with lavatory humor and reduce the audience (most of them) to a puddle was a joy.

Writing “Guy Noir, Private Eye” was easy work but work nevertheless. What gave me joy was songwriting, which had never been my ambition—I wasn’t a singer by trade, didn’t play guitar, had no urge to write a song that moves a crowd into standing with arms waving back and forth in the air and weeping and thereby making the world a better place— songwriting was purely for recreation. I like to write rhymed verse, limericks, sonnets, song lyrics, it’s all the same. It wasn’t about creativity, I stole freely. I wrote new words for Jacques Offenbach’s lovely “Barcarolle.”

I once learned to play melodies

Even the difficult parts

By bending down and gently releasing

Lovely melodic farts.

I was a promising baritone

Off on an opera career,

But many more people wanted to hear

Music come out of my rear.

I did a show from Rochester, home of the Mayo Clinic, and wrote new words to “The Glory of Love”—I’d give you my blood, give you my kidney, ’cause God told me to take care of you, didney, so I’m sticking with you everywhere, I’ll manage your meds and push your wheelchair. No matter what, you’re my story, whether or not you are ambulatory. That’s not theory, it’s the reality, dearie, of love. It was the childish pleasure of rhyming “kidney” with “didn’t he” and “theory” and “dearie.” A child could do it. Children do do it. So did I.

Unlike other songwriters who had to wait months for their work to see the light of airplay, I wrote mine on Friday and sang them on Saturday. Sang them once and never again.

And then I rediscovered Cole Porter’s “You’re the Top,” the raggedy 1934 hit with the sweet backbeat in which he rhymed “symphony by Strauss” with “Mickey Mouse,” and “summer night in Spain” with “cellophane,” the first person ever to think of that. The tune kept going through my head so I wrote new words to it.

You’re the top

You’re Honolulu

You’re the whop

Bop a be bop a lula

You’re so terrific, you’re a South Pacific home

You’re Barack Obama, you’re the Dalai Lama, you’re the pope in Rome.

You’re Bill Gates,

You’re Laurel and Hardy,

The candidates

Of the Republican Party

I’m a tragedy, a schlump from the Midwest

But if, baby, I’m the bottom, you’re the best.

The Porter rhythm was irresistible, and I was hooked on it and did a version for Nashville:

You’re Earl Scruggs

You’re Jerry Douglas.

You’re some hugs

When I’ve been hugless.

You’re a pecan pie with a satisfying belch

You’re an opera house, you’re Alison Krauss, you’re Gillian Welch.

I could not stop myself. I was addicted. And the Cole Porter Estate did nothing to stop me either. For a show at Goshen College, I did “You’re the Top” for Mennonites, surely a first, and they sat and listened in awestruck wonder:

You’re the top

You’re Anabaptist

You’re the whop

When the truth just slapped us

You’re pacifists, who persist in seeking peace

You’re in the business, of forgiveness, may your tribe increase

God has promised

You will rise like eagles

You’re like Amish

But with motor vehicles

I’m a fallen sinner utterly contrite

But if, baby, I have fallen, you’re upright.

It was so much fun rewriting Porter (You’re the FBI, Guy Noir, and Scotland Yard. You’re Giuseppe Verdi, the Bach concerti, you’re the National Guard ) and people loved hearing it so I kept at it (You’re the cloth on my down pillow. You’re Philip Roth, you’re Don DeLillo.) and nobody suggested I stop so I didn’t (Goodness knows, you’re worth knowin’, like Francine Prose or Leonard Cohen) because if the great Cole Porter could get delicious delight from rhyming in metrical timing, then why shouldn’t I?

This sense of delight I trace to a decision I made in 2002 when I was with my family on a cruise to Alaska and after a year of worrying about it I simply stopped drinking. Moderation didn’t work for me, and I didn’t want to join a group and sit in a circle of folding chairs in a church basement and talk about my emotionally distant father. I had an enormous capacity for wine and liquor and could do two stiff martinis and half a bottle of Barolo and a snifter of brandy and still talk in sentences and walk without holding on. I didn’t want to keep going down this path and become a debauched nobody and cause anguish to my wife and embarrass my little girl and be pitied by friends, and in my mind, an alcoholic is someone who can’t stop, so I decided to stop and not be one and not have to go into a 12-step program. Fear of therapy led me to change bad behavior. I’d been wayward long enough, time to straighten out. And I did. I made no announcement. My mantra was It’s easy to quit drinking so long as you don’t drink. Jenny noticed, and it came as a relief to her. I got back my good mornings when I woke up clearheaded with good ideas and could edit with a bold hand. A good early start leads to cheerfulness that lasts the day.

I’d drunk whiskey to loosen myself up, but actually it made me gloomy. Sobriety made me giddy. I started writing funny songs. It was a sweet mystery.

When God created Woman

He gave her not two breasts but three

But the middle one got in the way

So God performed surgery.

And Woman stood in front of God

With the middle breast in her hand

She said, “What can we do with the useless boob?”

And God created Man.

In my giddy sobriety, I became enamored of the name Piscacadawadaquoddymoggin and started sticking it in scripts every week. We worked our guests into the scripts, if they were willing, and most were, and we made a running joke of putting Piscacadawadaquoddymoggin into the guest’s lines, which made some of them blanch during the sound check but we assured them that it would draw a big laugh, which it did. And so Jack Lemmon, Martin Sheen, John Lithgow, Meryl Streep, John Cleese, Kelli O’Hara, Cokie Roberts, Walter Bobbie, Elvis Costello, Ira Glass, all found the P-word staring up at them—and it focused their minds but good. The fans in the audience knew the word was coming when the illustrious thespian approached the mike, paper in hand. Of course, he or she had been coached—the stress is on the third syllable and also the quod—and nobody fluffed utterly, but the anticipation of fluffage was fun to watch. Renée Fleming did it, as Renata Flambée, and Allison Janney as Carol Toledo of San Diego, and Emanuel Ax as Max Sanders, and maybe the line was Piscacadawadaquoddymoggin on the Penobscot peninsula and maybe they’d try to sell me a preparation made from pumpkin, peppers, peapods, peach pits, poppy seeds, purple peppers, and papyrus protoplasm that could cure priapism, pimples, impropriety, palpitations of the pupil, perspiration due to plumpness, and a propensity for pomposity. The guest who traversed all the pops and whistles got plenty of applause.

I was sober and flying high and the show was doing well, I bought a black Armani suit and a seersucker one for outdoor shows. I bought a bigger laptop. I had too much money, which gave me the chance to be stupid about real estate. Real estate ads were my pornography—I came close to buying a stone house on the Isle of Harris, it was insanity. I bought eighty acres of Wisconsin farmland and built on it, then realized I was a city guy and rural quiet made me uneasy. I grew up rural and rode my bike into the city and now I belonged there. By rights, I should have a legal guardian in real estate matters. I opened a bookstore, Common Good Books, a good deed that turned into a cash drain. It opened in a cellar under a coffee shop at Selby and Western in St. Paul: hundreds of people who walked by never noticed the tiny Open sign. I painted quotations from old heroes on the walls: Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. —Flannery O’Connor. But she and Updike and Roth, who painted recognizable American landscapes, were gone and the customers wanted novels about growing up abused and ostracized: ostracization was very big. The humor shelf was untouched, people preferred memoirs by widows, orphans, the mortally ill, mentally unstable, recovering fundamentalists, drug-dependent dental hygienists, that sort of thing. I was selling apples and people wanted zucchini. I lost a fortune. I was an absentee owner and when I walked in, the employees were shocked. The day I signed over the store to a new owner was a day of liberation. Someday I’ll earn back the money with a memoir about bookstore ownership and how the loss of quality fiction led me to drug addiction.

My prosperity was the fault of Sally Pope who back in the Eighties came up with the idea of offering a Powdermilk Biscuit poster to listeners, and the show became a financial boon to MPR. The tidal wave of orders gave the station a fine mailing list to which they sent a catalog of PHC products, which became a for-profit business. A young secretary named Donna Avery was put in charge, and it turned into one of those inspiring success stories in which the nicest person is picked out of the chorus and becomes a star. She became the Goddess of Commerce, built Rivertown Trading, which began with Powdermilk posters, into an enormous success, and when it was sold, it contributed mightily to the MPR endowment. I visited the shipping center once and was astonished— acres of merch on pallets, conveyor belts, assembly line packing, trucks at the loading docks. Mountains of CDs, DVDs, T-shirts, caps. The radio station earned millions from it.

This financial boom stimulated the creation of a commissariat of vice presidents whom I didn’t recognize because I was working all the time. They were like buzzards in a tree, defending their branch against other buzzards, feeding off the wounded below. They avoided me in the halls because clearly they found the show an embarrassment, the commercials, Piscacadawadaquoddymoggin, the gospel music, the joke shows. When you’re the Executive Vice President for Interactive Synergy and you fly away to a public radio conference in Santa Barbara and the other attendees look at your name badge and ask you about a show with rhubarb pie commercials and stories about Norwegian bachelor farmers, you feel not just insulted but also degraded.

In 2002, I was, as I was in 1974, a man at a keyboard—from an Underwood typewriter to a Selectric, then a CPT word processor, a Toshiba laptop, finally a MacBook—trying to keep the balloon aloft. I’d had my illusions and taken wrong turns, but the show was real and the music authentic and the comedy sketches and stories rode on the back of the wagon, and its being a live broadcast saved us from perfectionism. We took short views. I don’t remember what happened in 1991 or 2008 or 2012, but I remember what Thursdays were like, when the rubber hit the road, and the alarming rehearsal on Friday, and Saturday at 5 p.m. Central the show spread its wings and flew. And I remember the coroners moving onto the management floor and their resentment of the show’s success. I don’t remember the year it happened, just the chill.

In 2002, Prairie Home packed its bags and left the MPR building, an amicable disconnect under a new contract, and moved to an old one-story frame office building by the Soo Line tracks near the river, our home for the next fourteen years, which we called “The Fort.” Everyone had an office with a window and a door; Kate had the big one because she ran the place. There was no time clock, people worked as needed to get the job done. There was a big lunchroom, and once a month a catered meal, sometimes a masseuse came in, and if you wanted to work from home, you did. This staff accomplished more than any other twelve people since the apostles. Weekly shows, tours, the annual Holland America cruise, a summer tour, books, CDs—it proved that friendly working conditions are conducive to good work.

It was a relief to make a home at the Fort. MPR had gone corporate during my years on the road and spoke a technometromatic language unintelligible to us civilians, and though Bill Kling still protected the show from people who talked about “content” and “metrics,” he was loosening his grip, looking ahead to retirement, and I could feel the wolves watching from deep in the pines. The newsroom was enemy territory. Forty people working in tiny cubicles whose job was to fill small holes in Morning Edition and All Things Considered. There was no investigative journalism, not even a nod in that direction though everyone knew that public schools were in trouble, the Minneapolis Police Department was corrupt and beyond anyone’s control, and the state legislature was a medieval fiefdom of powerful lords. The newspeople focused on the arts, authors, academics, the nonprofit world, the comfort zone of the liberal intelligentsia. It was the sleepiest newsroom in town. Whenever I walked past it, I could feel the chill. PHC had earned millions for MPR and what’s more, we had a lot of fun doing it, and we were deeply resented by staff who, because they read the news in a college-educated voice, felt superior to the audience, and here was a tacky show with ketchup commercials and the damn hymns—what in hell is “Softly and Tenderly” doing on the same station that brings you the BBC News? And it was playing Tanglewood and Ravinia and Wolf Trap and selling all the seats, so it was beyond criticism. At the old KSJN, housed in cramped quarters, we rubbed elbows with news-people and classical music announcers, ate lunch together, knew each other’s families, and now, having contributed to the company’s bottom line, we lived among stone-faced people who wished we would die in a plane crash so they could write it up. As they say, No good deed goes unpunished.

I was teaching a class at the University, Composition of Comedy, and one week I flew back from New York for class and neglected to get back on Central Standard Time. I walked into the classroom, took off my coat, set my briefcase on the table, took out my notes about the importance of structure in comic writing, and smiled at the students and didn’t recognize any faces. I leaned down and said to a girl in the front row, “This isn’t composition, is it.” She said, “No, it’s trigonometry.” “Good,” I said. “That’s what I thought.” And picked up my briefcase and coat and headed for the exit as a young man with a crew cut and clear-rimmed glasses arrived and set his briefcase on the table. He was the trigonometry guy. Not me. I was in the wrong place. That’s how I felt about MPR. It was the home of the disgruntled, and I loved my job.

It was a happy time. I had a daughter who sat backstage and loved the women singers. I was sober. I ventured into philanthropy. I donated a saltwater swimming pool to a school and named it for my wife, who is a fearful swimmer. The audience was always lovely to behold. At a show at Tanglewood, a little girl in the front row fell sound asleep as people around her hooted and slapped their knees. She leaned her head against her mom and dozed off. A boy wrote to say that he loved Lake Wobegon because when it came on, his parents stopped fighting. A man died at a show at a winery near Seattle; he had been very ill for a long time but wanted to see the show and his wife brought him, and toward the end of the first hour he leaned against her and slipped away. She held him and during intermission, she told an usher and the EMTs came and carried him off.

I wrote a thousand songs. I wrote songs like some people make pies, occasional songs, nothing ever to sing again. I wrote a song for every stop on the way. The song about the Berkshires for a show at Tanglewood:

Under the bright blue Berkshire sky,

cars with kayak racks go by

the bakery where two old aunts

sit with coffee and croissants

and a ham and spinach quiche,

and a small dog on a leash.

Tourists holding bright brochures

describing the sightseeing tours.

Cellphone service is poor, or worse,

so people sit down and converse

with people a few feet away,

as Emily Dickinson did in her day.

As I do now, in your ear:

I am happy to be here.

I was a song machine, and Rich Dworsky improvised accompaniment. For Bend, Oregon (Life is sweet at 3,625 feet and many people relocate to a city named for not being straight) and Milwaukee (In a city with so many breweries, how do they find people to serve on grand juries? Where Oktoberfest is not limited to Oktober, how many judges are sober?) and Nantucket (I am simply delighted to be in a town about which limericks are recited ). I wrote one about Los Angeles, sang it once at the Bowl. No orange groves in Orange County. And Manhattan Beach? No way. Not much adventure in Ventura but you can bake in Bakersfield all day. Nothing surprising in Eureka, and San Jose—what can I say? Not much holy in Sacramento though it’s sandy in San Diego Bay. Nobody’s modest in Modesto but I admit I love LA. I feel empty in Yosemite. Take me away to LA.

And having written one for LA, I wrote one a few weeks later for SF.

I walked in San Francisco in the fog and the mist.

I went out a Lutheran, came back a humanist.

Got back to the hotel and my spirit rejoiced:

This town may be cold but by God it is moist.

Richard Dworsky, music director.

I loved to write parodies of Dylan, who wrote so many great parodies of himself.

If not for you, I’d have no revenue,

Never would’ve got through the U,

I’d screw up my job interview, be totally screwed,

One sad dude living in solitude in the nude,

No aptitude to pursue,

Wouldn’t know beef stew

From chicken cordon bleu,

Or conditioner from shampoo, if not for you.

Satire is perishable, like lettuce. The few songs of mine that still appeal are straightforward love songs. I don’t care about your wine list. I’ll just have a glass of beer. I don’t need to hear the specials. I just wish that she were here. I wrote it when I was alone in New York and Jenny was on the road with City Opera and the city felt empty. I wrote one for my grandsons. In the valley here we be, sitting on your daddy’s knee, Freddie and his brother Charlie eating chocolate candy. Summer days I was a kid, all the funny things we did. When grownups came, we ran and hid, back behind the lilacs. In the heat of summer sun, round and round the yard we run, chase the dog and just for fun we put him in the sprinkler. Summer days my pals and I lay and looked up at the sky, wondered how do airplanes fly over Minnesota.

In my twenties, I aimed to be a satirist because it was an acceptable outlet for arrogance, and now, looking back, my New Yorker stories seem very dated, locked in the leather harness of irony. I loved the emotional freedom of the radio show that let me sing a lullaby to my child: Little girl lost in a forest of dreams. For a moment it seems something big and cold got ahold of you. But Daddy’s arms will gather you in. I will take you home. Where we go, there will be birds to cheer you. Where we go, I’ll be right here near you. I will take you home. The audience takes a deep breath, they recognize the feeling, they’ve been there, they appreciate freedom from irony, they feel comforted. My dad never put his arms around me that I recall. It doesn’t matter. I was wealthy with aunts, and twenty years ago the last of them left the world while I wasn’t looking and I wrote:

Goodbye to my uncles, farewell to my aunts.

One after another, they went and lay down

In the green pastures beside the still waters

And make no sound.

Their arms that held me for so many years

Their beautiful voices no longer I’ll hear

They’re in Jesus’ arms and He’s talking to them

In the rapturous New Jerusalem,

And I know they’re at peace in a land of delight,

But I miss them tonight.

It’s a good song. I still sing it now and then. When it comes to love, we are all amateurs. A person can develop fine skills of mockery, and, God knows, love makes us vulnerable to satire. You embrace your wife and speak tenderly and you hear the snickers of your teenage children. Love between the elderly is hilarious to them. Nonetheless, I hold her tight and grasp her rear end and the satirists go Ewwww in disgust, and this gives an old satirist like me pleasure, having love and being mocked for it, and also holding the finest of all buttocks. I have a framed photograph of my wife, naked, and when I die, I want it to come along with me, in the event I am accidentally buried alive. And also a flashlight.