"Named for the fictional town in the radio series A Prairie Home Companion, what is the Lake Wobegon effect? (Hint: According to Garrison Keillor, the presenter of the show, here ""all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average"")"
"good-looking, and all the children are above average"" has been used to describe a real and pervasive human tendency to overestimate one's achievements and capabilities in relation to others. To support the view that people in general need to believe that they are above average (the Lake Wobegon effect) one author points out that in a survey of high school students, only 2% of the students reported that they were below average in leadership ability. The authors of a study suggest that what they consider the “Lake Wobegon effect” can in some cases negatively affect doctors' treatment advice when, in"
"Lake Wobegon Lake Wobegon is a fictional town created by Garrison Keillor as the setting of the ""News from Lake Wobegon"" segment of the radio program ""A Prairie Home Companion"". Lake Wobegon is also the setting of many of Keillor's stories and novels. It is described as a small rural town in central Minnesota, and is peopled with fictional characters and places, many of which became familiar to listeners of the broadcast. The events and adventures of the townspeople provided Keillor with a wealth of humorous and often touching stories. Keillor has said that people often ask him if it"
"planning treatment, doctors portray the patients as “above average”. Keillor himself has offered a contrarian opinion on the use of the term, observing that the effect does not actually apply in Lake Wobegon itself. In response to a listener query on the Prairie Home website, he pointed out that, in keeping with their Scandinavian heritage, Wobegonians prefer to downplay, rather than overestimate, their capabilities or achievements. Businesses, organizations and landmarks in Lake Wobegon include: Keillor has written several semi-autobiographical books about life in Lake Wobegon, including: Lake Wobegon Lake Wobegon is a fictional town created by Garrison Keillor as the"
"includes: Garrison Keillor Gary Edward ""Garrison"" Keillor (born August 7, 1942) is an American author, storyteller, humorist, voice actor, and radio personality. He is best known as the creator of the Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) show ""A Prairie Home Companion"" (called ""Garrison Keillor's Radio Show"" in some international syndication), which he hosted from 1974 to 2016. Keillor created the fictional Minnesota town Lake Wobegon, the setting of many of his books, including ""Lake Wobegon Days ""and """". Other creations include Guy Noir, a detective voiced by Keillor who appeared in ""A Prairie Home Companion"" comic skits. Keillor is also the"
"Garrison Keillor Gary Edward ""Garrison"" Keillor (born August 7, 1942) is an American author, storyteller, humorist, voice actor, and radio personality. He is best known as the creator of the Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) show ""A Prairie Home Companion"" (called ""Garrison Keillor's Radio Show"" in some international syndication), which he hosted from 1974 to 2016. Keillor created the fictional Minnesota town Lake Wobegon, the setting of many of his books, including ""Lake Wobegon Days ""and """". Other creations include Guy Noir, a detective voiced by Keillor who appeared in ""A Prairie Home Companion"" comic skits. Keillor is also the creator"
"7.9% of the population were below the poverty line, including 6.3% of those under age 18 and 14.3% of those age 65 or over. Garrison Keillor, creator of Lake Wobegon and host of the radio variety show A Prairie Home Companion, has written that Stearns County in general and Freeport specifically, in addition to other small Minnesota towns, were inspirations for his fictional town, Lake Wobegon. In 1998, the county honored Keillor and his show by naming a section of abandoned rail line the Lake Wobegon Trail. An aerial shot of Freeport, including the iconic water tower, was featured in"
"Pontoon: A Novel of Lake Wobegon Pontoon: A Novel of Lake Wobegon is a novel by Garrison Keillor, a humorous fictional account of life in the fictitious heartland town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. It was first published in hardcover by Viking Press in September 2007. Lake Wobegon is one of the habitats of the radio show Prairie Home Companion. The novel begins with the death of 81-year-old Evelyn Peterson in her sleep. Evelyn was a widow who had a reputation for staying positive yet straightforward with the way she lived life in her later years, in direct counter to the"
"Lake Wobegon Days Lake Wobegon Days is a novel by Garrison Keillor, first published in hardcover by Viking in 1985. Based on material from his radio show ""A Prairie Home Companion"", the book brought Keillor's work to a much wider audience and achieved international success. Like some of Keillor's other books, it is unusual in that it could be said that the audiobook preceded the publication in written form. The work is a humorous account of life in fictitious Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, a heartland small town. Its early chapters are written in the form and style of a history of"
"from Lake Wobegon"", was the show's best-known feature during his long tenure. Distributed by Minnesota Public Radio's distribution arm, American Public Media, ""A Prairie Home Companion"" was heard on 690 public radio stations in the United States at its peak in spring 2015 and reached an audience of four million U.S. listeners each week. The show borrowed its name from a radio program in existence in 1969 that was named after the Prairie Home Cemetery near Concordia College, in Moorhead, Minnesota. It inspired a 2006 film of the same name, written by Keillor, directed by Robert Altman, and featuring Keillor,"
"the town and later ones chronicle the lives, concerns, and activities of its inhabitants, with intergenerational tensions and relationships forming a major theme. Most of the latter material was originally delivered on radio in the form of monologues. Due to the nature of the original material, the second half of the novel has many recurring characters but little in the way of plot, resembling an incompletely integrated group of short stories. Lake Wobegon Days Lake Wobegon Days is a novel by Garrison Keillor, first published in hardcover by Viking in 1985. Based on material from his radio show ""A Prairie"
"the audience. Also regularly featured were the adventures of Dusty and Lefty, ""The Lives of the Cowboys"". One of the show's best-known features was Keillor's ""News from Lake Wobegon"", a weekly storytelling monologue, claiming to be a report from his fictitious hometown of Lake Wobegon, ""the little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve ... where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average"". The opening words of the monologue usually did not change: ""Well, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, my hometown, out on the"
"Lake Wobegon Trails The Lake Wobegon Trails are two paved recreational rail trails in central Minnesota, named after the fictional Lake Wobegon in Garrison Keillor's ""Prairie Home Companion"". Each trail is marked with mileposts every , corresponding with the mile markers of the former railroad lines. Snowmobile use is allowed on the trail in winter, conditions permitting. The main trail is a trail along a former Burlington Northern Railroad line, beginning near milepost 81 in St. Joseph and ending near milepost 130 in Osakis. This trail runs parallel to I-94. The trail passes through the cities of Avon, Albany, Freeport,"
"compared to the Minneapolis Greenway. Lake Wobegon Trails The Lake Wobegon Trails are two paved recreational rail trails in central Minnesota, named after the fictional Lake Wobegon in Garrison Keillor's ""Prairie Home Companion"". Each trail is marked with mileposts every , corresponding with the mile markers of the former railroad lines. Snowmobile use is allowed on the trail in winter, conditions permitting. The main trail is a trail along a former Burlington Northern Railroad line, beginning near milepost 81 in St. Joseph and ending near milepost 130 in Osakis. This trail runs parallel to I-94. The trail passes through the"
"of bizarre incidents in the fictional town's early history, akin to the events in Black River Falls in ""Wisconsin Death Trip"". Keillor identifies the original founders of what became Lake Wobegon as New England Unitarian missionaries, at least one of whom came to convert the Native American Ojibwe Indians through interpretive dance. A college was founded at what was then called New Albion, but the project was abandoned after a severe winter and numerous attacks by bears. The project had only one survivor, a very practical woman who married a French Canadian fur trapper who fed her in exchange for"
"Leaving Home: A Collection of Lake Wobegon Stories Leaving Home: A Collection of Lake Wobegon Stories is a short story anthology written by Garrison Keillor, a humorous fictional account of life in small-town Minnesota set in the fictitious heartland town of Lake Wobegon. It was first published in hardcover by Viking Penguin, Inc. in 1987. The book is a collection of thirty-six of the author's ""News from Lake Wobegon"" monologues from his radio program ""A Prairie Home Companion"", slightly revised for print publication. They are prefaced by ""A Letter from Copenhagen."" At the time of the book's initial publication, Keillor"
"vocals for some of the show's musical numbers. The show airs from the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul. After the show's intermission, Keillor reads clever and often humorous greetings to friends and family at home submitted by members of the theater audience in exchange for an honorarium. Also in the second half of the show, Keillor delivers a monologue called ""The News from Lake Wobegon"", a fictitious town based in part on Keillor's own hometown of Anoka, Minnesota, and on Freeport and other small towns in Stearns County, Minnesota, where he lived in the early 1970s. Lake Wobegon is a"
"the publishing firm Random House, known for his own compilations of jokes and puns, for regular personal appearances lecturing across the United States, and for his television appearances on the panel game show ""What's My Line?"" Art Buchwald (1925–2007) wrote a political satire op-ed column for ""The Washington Post"", which was nationally syndicated in many newspapers. Garrison Keilor (born 1942) is an author, storyteller, voice actor, and radio personality, best known as the creator and host of the Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) show ""A Prairie Home Companion"" from 1974 to 2016. He created the fictional Minnesota town Lake Wobegon, the"
"names. They mask the ethnic heritage of the town, which I wanted to do, since it was half Norwegian, half German."" The English word ""woebegone"" means ""affected with woe."" Keillor's weekly monologue about Lake Wobegon included recurring elements: Lake Wobegon resembles many small farm towns in the Upper Midwest, especially western Minnesota, North Dakota, and to some extent, northern Iowa, Wisconsin, eastern South Dakota and northeastern Montana. These are rural, sparsely populated areas that were settled only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, largely by homesteading immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia. One of these, Holdingford, Minnesota, which Keillor"
"had left ""A Prairie Home Companion"", and this was apparently a farewell to Lake Wobegon. He would, however, return to the program and to creating Lake Wobegon monologues in the 1990s. Spaulding Gray, reviewing the collection in ""The New York Times"", called its contents ""perfect bedtime stories ... exactly the right length and mood to put you out at the end and not in the middle, so you can slip off with a well-rounded sense of joyful completion."" He found them ""primarily wholesome American images that often begin with a description of local weather and glide through a landscape of"
"of Native American place names in the New England region of the United States, most of them in Maine (i.e.: Piscataqua, Passamaquoddy, and Androscoggin). The show creates fictional advertisements for fictional products, performed in the style of live old-time radio commercials. The show acknowledges its actual underwriters at the beginning, end, and middle (break) of the show. ""Prairie Home""s most prominent ""sponsor"" is the fictitious ""Powdermilk Biscuits"". Before he and the band performed the product's jingle every week (""Has your family tried 'em, Powdermilk?""), Garrison Keillor would extol Powdermilk's virtues in this way: Among its other ""sponsors"", Bebop-A-Reebop Rhubarb Pie"
"a its baseball park began. The Avon Loins Club purchased land directly south of the old park which at that time consisted of a pasture and a small pond. The Avon Lakers and the City of Avon sponsor the Region 8C Baseball Tournament. In the 35th anniversary broadcast of the radio variety show, ""A Prairie Home Companion"", which was performed live in Avon on July 4, 2009, radio personality Garrison Keillor referred to Avon as being ""about as close to Lake Wobegon as you can get."" Avon, Minnesota Avon is a city in Stearns County, Minnesota, United States. The population"
"program featured a broadly similar format to ""A Prairie Home Companion"", with sketches and musical guests reflecting a more New York sensibility, rather than the country and folk music predominant in ""APHC"". Also, while Keillor sang and delivered a regular monologue on ""American Radio Company"", Lake Wobegon was initially downplayed, as he felt it was ""cruel"" to talk to a Brooklyn audience about life in a small town. During this period, Keillor revived the full ""APHC"" format only for ""annual farewell performances"". In the fall of 1992, Keillor returned to the World Theater with ""ARC"" for the majority of the"
"season, with Lake Wobegon and other ""APHC"" elements gradually but unmistakably returning to prominence. The following year, on October 2, 1993, the program officially reverted to the ""A Prairie Home Companion"" name and format. While many of the episodes originated from St. Paul, the show often traveled to other cities around the U.S. and overseas for its live weekly broadcasts. Common road venues included The Town Hall in New York City; Tanglewood in Lenox, Massachusetts; Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts in Vienna, Virginia; Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee; the Greek Theater in Los Angeles; and the State"
"of Perpetual Responsibility, and descendants of Norwegian and Swedish immigrants, who attend Lake Wobegon Lutheran Church. Keillor's family were members of the Sanctified Brethren. The 800 residents (1950 Census: 728) are proud of the ""Statue of the Unknown Norwegian"" (so called because the model left before the sculptor could get his name). Lake Wobegon is in competition with its fictional rival, St. Olaf, for having the most descendants of the same common ancestor. Lake Wobegon became a secret dumping ground of nuclear waste during the 1950s. The fictional town is the home of the Whippets baseball team, tuna hotdish, snow,"
"in an exposition prior to an excerpt of the novel, Keillor wrote that the story for ""Pontoon"" originated from a storytelling tour he did in the early 90s to pay for a divorce. Pontoon currently holds a 3.53 rating on Goodreads, based on over 2,900 ratings and over 350 reviews. Thomas Mallon reviewed the book for the ""Sunday Book Review"" of the New York Times. Pontoon: A Novel of Lake Wobegon Pontoon: A Novel of Lake Wobegon is a novel by Garrison Keillor, a humorous fictional account of life in the fictitious heartland town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. It was"
"by midmorning."" He concludes """"Leaving Home"" will most likely make Garrison Keillor's fans love him all the more. For you who don't like him or have not taken the time to shape an opinion, I recommend that you at least go to a bookstore and open the book to a story at random and read it while standing up. They're short enough to do that without getting tired. For some of you, they will make you remember the home you never had."" Leaving Home: A Collection of Lake Wobegon Stories Leaving Home: A Collection of Lake Wobegon Stories is a"
"Sue Scott (actress) Sue Scott is an American actress and character voice actor (AFTRA/SAG/AEA) in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. She is best known for her work as a radio comedy actor on Garrison Keillor's public radio show, ""A Prairie Home Companion"", and for her work as a voice-over talent in radio and television commercials. She has also appeared in films and television. She has appeared in productions at the Great American History Theatre, Nautilus Music-Theater, Mixed Blood Theatre, The Minnesota Festival Theater, Illusion Theater, and Dudley Riggs' Brave New Workshop. While a theater major at the University of Arizona,"
"and Watkins. As well, he performed his last ""News from Lake Wobegon"" segment, with its final closing description of the fictional town, where “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” Thile made his debut as permanent host on October 15, 2016. On November 29, 2017, Minnesota Public Radio terminated its contract with Keillor because of ""allegations of his inappropriate behavior with an individual who worked with him."" Because Keillor still owned artistic rights and the trademark to the show's name, MPR also announced that it would change the name, which"
"edge of the prairie."" Keillor often poked fun at central Minnesota's large Scandinavian-American and German-American communities, and many of his fictional characters have names that reflect this. The ""News from Lake Wobegon"" did not have a set structure, but featured recurring characters and places such as the Chatterbox Café, the Sidetrack Tap, Pastor Ingqvist of the Lake Wobegon Lutheran Church and his successor Pastor Liz, Father Emil of Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility Roman Catholic Church (a parody of Our Mother of Perpetual Help), the Lake Wobegon Whippets sports teams, various members of the Bunsen and Krebsbach families, and an"
"north of St. Cloud. Microsoft Virtual Earth now returns a location when Lake Wobegon, Minnesota is entered into its search engine. The place is a little north and somewhat east of St. Cloud. The programs distributed at live performances of ""A Prairie Home Companion"" in 2005 had a map showing Lake Wobegon about two miles north of Holdingford, northwest of St. Cloud. Keillor often refers to a cafe in downtown Lake Wobegon called the ""Chatterbox Cafe"". There is a real cafe and gas station in Olivia by the same name. Olivia is in north-central Renville County. Keillor chronicles a number"
"negative and passive-aggressive personalities of the Lake Wobegon townsfolk. Barbara, Evelyn's daughter, discovers her mother's body the next morning. Barbara is divorced, works as a school lunchlady, and lives a life troubled by her past and complicated by recurring alcoholism. The death is a shock, since Evelyn had been in seemingly-great health in the days prior. Barbara soon notifies both her overbearing aunt Flo, and her son Kyle, a college student at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Going through her mother's personal effects, Barbara soon comes across two huge tidbits of information. One is a last will and testament, in"
"Saint Paul, are leading youth theaters. The Public Radio program ""A Prairie Home Companion"", hosted by Minnesota native Garrison Keillor aired live for many years from the Fitzgerald Theater in Saint Paul. The show ended its run in 2016, with its successor ""Live from Here"" also airing from the same venue. Minnesota's climate has done much to shape the image and culture of the state. Minnesotans boast of their ""theater of seasons"", with a late but intense spring, a summer of water sports, a fall of brilliantly colored leaves in the state's parks and hardwood forests, and a long winter"
"A Prairie Home Companion A Prairie Home Companion is a weekly radio variety show created and hosted by Garrison Keillor that aired live from 1974 to 2016. In 2016, musician Chris Thile took over as host, and the successor show was eventually renamed ""Live from Here"". ""A Prairie Home Companion"" aired on Saturdays from the Fitzgerald Theater in Saint Paul, Minnesota; it was also frequently heard on tours to New York City and other U.S. cities. The show is known for its musical guests, especially folk and traditional musicians, tongue-in-cheek radio drama, and relaxed humor. Keillor's wry storytelling segment, ""News"