Garrison Keillor and the youngest adults in the audience

Last night, Bede and I went to see Garrison Keillor at the Paramount Theatre. I had bought the tickets as the third part of a mini-subscription series so I could get early-bird tickets for Sarah Vowell and Dan Zanes. I’d listened to Garrison Keillor on the radio, first when I was a little girl, and then when I was in college. In more recent years, the voices and humor styles of Ira Glass, David Sedaris and the aforementioned Vowell appealed to me far more than Keillor’s, but still, this was the guy who brought me the CaféBoeuf skits. For one night, I was willing to be a member of the audience.

What Bede and I did not know beforehand was that we would be the youngest members of the audience. I’m 34. Bede is 36. For the first time in a good while, we felt “too young” for the crowd around us. We eavesdropped on conversations about today’s youth and its obsession with iPods and video-games. “With today’s generation, it’s all about hanging out with your friends, listening to music, " someone said. Someone else said, "Everything has to be in-your-face. They miss the subtleties that we grew up with.” The people talking were children of the fifties and sixties. What exactly did they remember? I wondered. What exactly did they forget?

When Garrison Keillor came on stage, he shared memories of listening to his aunts’ stories and running around on the farm, but couldn’t recall when he started to use the internet. Keillor sang about winters in Minnesota, crooned pseudo-cheeky limericks about the current political administration and waxed nostalgic about the simpler times of long ago when people weren’t afraid to help out hobos and hitchhikers. At the end, he got a standing ovation. (In Seattle, everyone gets a standing ovation.) I clapped, but I definitely felt out of my element.

I am not a fan of nostalgia. Nostalgia says, “My era was better than your era.” Some parts were definitely better, of which I have no doubt. Some parts definitely were worse. Say what you like about the proliferation of cell-phones and how they’ve invaded all aspects of our lives, but I am grateful for cell phones. I remember family trips where we were stuck by the side of the road because our car had broken down. I remember trying to communicate to my parents via mental telepathy that I was okay, I just had to stay after school for a bit, back when it was considered impolite to have answering machines. As far as email goes, I remember exactly when I started using it. Because of email, I have reconnected with people I thought were lost to me long ago. I know I’m now of the older generation because I don’t feel the need to send text-messages, and I’m satisfied with my clunker of a cell-phone. I don’t want to be part of the younger generation, though. I want to be an ally. As terrifying as it might be to encounter a group of boisterous high schoolers falling over themselves with laughter might be, or even worse, a group of snickering, sniggering junior high students, I don’t have to dig very deeply to find that this wide demographic of young adults is made up of individuals with their own thoughts, anxieties, and ambitions. If you don’t believe me, just read the literature out there.

Some of my favorite young adult novels include:

The Chocolate War—Robert Cormier
Catherine, Called Birdy—Karen Cushman
Annie on My Mind—Nancy Garden
The Outsiders—S.E. Hinton
The Adventures of Blue Avenger—Norma Howe
The Adrian Mole Diaries—Sue Townsend
Like Sisters on the Homefront—Rita Williams-Garcia
Probably Still Nick Swansen—Virginia Euwer Wolf