A Prairie Home Companion Weekend

My parents visited this past weekend for what turned out to be a very productive (notice the recent theme?), tasty, and fun weekend.

Productive: major yard work. It's never looked so good. I think my parents should open up a landscaping / garden consulting / sweet corn operation when they retire.

Tasty: good food. We ate at my favorite restaurant in the Cities, 128 Cafe. We also checked out Cafe Lurcat. Lurcat was just ok in my opinion. I got the feeling that they were trying too hard to be a high class establishment. And they seriously need to fix their acoustic issues. We weren't in the bar. And it's not a club -- it's a restaurant. Why am I shouting? You hear me Lurcat? No? That's right -- fix your acoustics. We finished the high-calorie weekend at Edina Creamery and Yum! (appropriately named if you ask me).

Fun: Everything was fun, but the topper was seeing Prairie Home Companion (click the link for audio clips and pictures from the show), with special guest Wilco. The show overall was great. Wilco was awesome.

For those of you unfamiliar with the show, about halfway through it Garrison will read off various "greetings". They range from "Happy 90th birthday Francis", to "Congratulations Franky on getting your drivers license. Don't crash my car." Upon entering the theater, they provide you with scrap paper and pencil, and you have a minute to come up with a sentence that will hopefully be creative enough or sentimental enough to reach Garrison's hands.

In my haste, I believe I wrote, "Hello to [my parents], who after 30 years of marriage still sleep next to each other." We rushed to our seats, and upon sitting down I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. I realized I had written down the wrong anniversary number. I considered running back downstairs to change it, but figured it would be nearly impossible to find my slip of paper amongst the hundreds of others. And besides, what are the chances that Garrison would read my note?

Funny how things work out.

About halfway through the greetings he read my message. My jaw dropped, and my parents looked at me in startled confusion, asking was that their name he just read over live radio to his millions of faithful listeners. Yep. Funny how things work out.