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Speaker 1: I like flying out of the Atlanta Airport. I go

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through screening, and the TSA lady scouts through my briefcase

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and wipes my shoes with a cloth to detect explosive fragments,

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and then she says, you're good to go, sweetheart. First

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I'm a suspected terrorist, and then I'm a close personal friend.

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I did two shows in Georgia a few weeks ago

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after the election, at both of which I walked out

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on stage and I said, it's been a hard week

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for US Marxist communists. But there's a song I want

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you to sing, which is often played triumphantly by brass bands,

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But it's not about triumph so much as survival. The

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fact that after the rocket's red glare and the bombs

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bursting in air, the flag was still flying and a

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hum the note a G note, and a thousand people

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stood and sang it majestically, a cappella with four part harmony,

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on the Land of the Free and the Brave, and

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some ushers told me the audience was at least half Republican.

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It was very moving. What they did in the election

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was shameful, but at least they're capable of human feeling,

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and they sang gorgeously. The next morning, a woman came

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over to me in the dining room of the hotel

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and said she had flown from Houston to see the

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show the night before, and she'd enjoyed it, and we

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fell into conversation. She'd grown up in Vicksburg in the sixties,

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and she discovered early on that she had an affinity

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for math, and she studied it in college, and she

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rose to a point where she was often the lone

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woman in the room. She remembered some of her professors

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hinting that she'd gone into math in order to find

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a good husband, but her love of math was based

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on a love of logic, that there are clear lines

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between true and false, the truth can be proven. And

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her sorrow about the election was that falsehood had won

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and would wield enormous power. Trump had exploited fear and

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resentment and bigotry to exploit divisiveness to win the day.

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And she remembered how in the Vicksburg of her childhood,

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the church ladies of town, black and white ladies in

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big hats had joined forces to maintain a standard of civility.

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It's rare that I get to talk with a member

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of my audience. Sometimes people walk up with their phone

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out and say, do you mind if I bother you

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for a selfie? And we huddle together and they come

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away with a snapshot of themselves with an old man.

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But what happened with the Houston woman was a face

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to face encountered, just as we used to do before

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Facebook and face time. And then I had another conversation

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with a woman who'd been at the show. She was forty,

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the mother of two kids whom she was homeschooling in order,

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she said, to give them a chance to find themselves

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and grow into their personalities without the powerful distractions of

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TV and video, cell phones, social media, which she felt

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corrupt a child's imagination. She limited her kids to thirty

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minutes of video a day, and cell phones were forbidden,

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No texting, no posting. She could see the benefits up

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close already, the flowering of their minds, their feelings, their expressiveness. Again,

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it was a genuine encounter. Sitting at a table drinking coffee.

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The first woman apologized for bothering me, But conversation is

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no bother, never has been. She had sat in Symphony

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Hall and listened to me and now I got to

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return the favor and hear the story of a woman

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who'd had a happy career in mathematics, not teaching it,

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but applying it in the scientific corporate world. If I

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want privacy, I know how to find it. But public

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spaces are meant for these encounters. I'm grateful that as

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a kid, I got to experience what we call visiting,

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when the family got in the car and dropped in

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at someone's house and sat around and we visited. We

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kids sat quietly listened to the elders reminisce about their childhoods,

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which could be a real revelation, hearing their different versions

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of family history. Who looked out the window of the

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school house and cried our houses on fire, And the

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day Joe Louks drowned in the Rum River, And the

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winter night Grandpa woke up the kids, seven of them,

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got them dressed, hiked out to the meadow to look

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at the silver timber wolf howling at the moon. What

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lives in memory is first hand experience. I read the

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pundit's eulogies after the election, but I remember those two

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women and those two audiences. A prairie home companion's fiftieth

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anniversary two CD set is packed with music, favorite sketches,

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and of course, the news from Lake Wolglegng. The rollicking

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celebration was recorded live at the Fitzgerald Theater. More info

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at Garrisoncuther dot com