The Shed at Tanglewood, open on three sides, can seat more than 5,000. An equal number can sit on the lawn and listen to the show on a fine sound system. We had tickets for seats in the shed.
Moving 10,000 people in an out of a town is a considerable task. The Lenox police, assisted by the Berkshire County sheriff's Department, did a spectacularly bad job managing the traffic flow to the Tanglewood site. Granted, the route to Tanglewood takes you along some narrow roads and through the village of Lenox, but the volume of traffic is well known. They've been hosting such events, several times a week, for 65 years. The ride from the camp to the Lee exit on the Pike took just about two and a half hours, including a stop at Whole Foods in Hadley to pick up our dinner. It took us a bit more than an hour to complete the remaining seven miles, from Lee to Tanglewood. We had our tasty dinner of Thai slaw, French bread, potato salad, and coconut chicken in the car. I thought that three-and-a-half hours would be plenty of time to get us there. I was mistaken. We arrived about 10 minutes late, but, fortunately, had aisle seats.
Garrison had recently relearned a brief hymn from an aunt. He taught the hymn to us and which we reprised throughout the show:
Palms of victoryHe taught it in four parts. Peter Schickle led the bases and I found myself singing along. It fit nicely in my three-quarter octave range. I also sang the National Anthem, but spared everyone my attempts at the high notes.
Crowns of glory
Palms of victory
We shall wear [emended @ 10:20AM]
The song, Palms of Victory, is a old tune. Bob Dylan used something similar in an outtake on the Times They Are A-Changin' album, Paths of Victory.
Why do right-handed people finger stringed instruments with their left hands?
There's a running joke in the MacGregor family. When Woody would go to a Red Sox game, he'd invariably leave at the 7th inning stretch and listen to the rest of the game on the radio on the way home. Often, they'd miss some dramatic comebacks. People were leaving right after the News from Lake Wobegon to get a jump on traffic. We hung around the grounds and heard a full half hour of encore music. One of my favorite performers, a regular on the show, is Prudence Johnson. She has such a clear, sweet voice. She doesn't record much, but brings a wealth of musical experience and expression to the show. She was featured during the encores. I bought a couple of Gillian Welch CDs in the gift shop.
We've attended three PHC shows and this was, IMO, the best. The music was first rate, the writing crisp. And, he read our card. I brought greetings for Huck from three of us and handed the card to Garrison at the stage.
So Prairie Home Companion has become the Lawrence Welk show for the Boomers. There were some people under 40 there, on their own, but not many. We sat next to a teenager, attending the show with her parents. She exuded the excruciating boredom that only teenagers can produce. Her parents tried to buy her things, but she would have preferred an evening at the orthodontist office. Our parents watch reruns of Lawrence Welk every chance they get. It wouldn't surprise me that standard issue for nursing homes in 2015 will be a can of Ensure, a pair of no-slip slippers, and a Garrison Keillor musical implant.
Getting out of town wasn't much better. The folks at the Department of Homeland Security should study the behavior of exiting crowds if we can ever hope to have orderly evacuations in the case of disasters of any magnitude. We had to walk along the side of the road to get to our parking area in the field. A woman honked at Sandra so that she could hurry along and wait in the line ahead.
We saw fireworks in various towns on the ride home, including private fireworks on the Connecticut River.
But we got back to the camp safely. The sky was clear, the lake was calm, and you could see the constellations reflected on the smooth water. A couple of years ago, Sandra and I took a course on astronomy, learning enough to pick out some basic features of the northern sky. We're pretty small, but we're where we belong.
The weekend weather was as perfect as you could get, warm when it was supposed to be, cool where it was supposed to be. We did experience a bit of news withdrawal. The world we'd left behind had a Supreme Court justice resignation, continued war in Iraq, the Live 8 concerts, G-8 meetings, continued famines and strife in Africa, and the missing-white-girl-of-the-week story. Naturally, then, channel 5, the best of the lot in Boston TV, had a story about a horse that was frightened by fireworks and ran away. But it came back.
That night, Sunday, we heard the eerie sounds of Bongo Boy out on the lake. More about him in another note.
Sandra will drive Phyllis to the airport shuttle station in Framingham and we will all make our way to our respective places this morning.
Good luck on your new job, Jennie.
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