Episcopal Press and News
Keillor Performs in Soup Kitchen Fund-raiser
Episcopal News Service. April 21, 1988 [88076]
NEW YORK (DPS, Apr. 21) -- Humorist Garrison Keillor, the Bard of Lake Wobegon, brought an evening of stories, hymns, doggerel, and satire to the Church of the Holy Apostles in New York City in mid-April, as a fund-raiser for that church's soup kitchen, the largest on-site feeding program in the Episcopal Church.
"It was Keillor who came to us," said the Rev. Catherine Roskam, associate at Holy Apostles and project director of the Soup Kitchen. The Rev. William Greenlaw, rector and executive director of the facility, added, "He indicated to us that he has been more and more concerned for the plight of the homeless, and he wanted to do what he could to support this outreach."
Keillor was for 13 years the host of the popular public radio program, "A Prairie Home Companion." Accompanied by musician Butch Thompson, he regaled the evening's benefactors with his own new adventures in the Episcopal Church, claiming that he first stepped into an Anglican church during his summer in 1987 in Denmark: "The English language has always been real important to me in worship." Since Keillor moved to New York, he has frequently attended an Episcopal parish in the city.
He also performed a specially reworked version of "Ain't Misbehavin'":
Theology's easy/The liturgy, too;
Kneel down and stand up/And say what the others do
Episcopalian, here on Ninth Avenue.
I bless myself/With a flick of my wrist
You'd never know/I was raised fundamentalist
Episcopalian, I'm savin' my love for you.
Roskam called the evening a success. Some $9000 in funds were raised to support the work of the Soup Kitchen, which at the facility's current rate of service is almost a week's worth of expenses. The feeding program, which has served as a national model for other soup kitchens and has been featured on segments of "The CBS Evening News," served 209,000 guest meals in 1987 and estimates that it will serve its millionth meal sometime late in the summer. "We're ambivalent about observing that event," notes Roskam. "We'd rather hunger disappeared off the face of the earth."
Keillor's support was considered timely, even crucial, at this juncture both in the Soup Kitchen's history and in the shape of the larger public discussion of poverty, according to Greenlaw. "The problem is with us increasingly, but it's an issue that's getting harder and harder to fund," he said. "At this point, it's just a matter of keeping alive. We've been staying only one month ahead of ourselves in reserves." In addition to feeding walk-in guests -- sometimes as many as 1000 meals a day -- the kitchen delivers bag lunches to women and children at two neighborhood welfare hotels
At the opening of the evening, Keillor described the event as "the first benefit I've had to beg to do. They said they didn't want to take advantage of me, but I assured them it was all right."
He parodied the differences between his impressions of the Episcopal Church and his conservative religious upbringing in Minnesota: "The first sermon I heard when I walked in was about homeless gay migrant workers in Nicaragua. I thought, 'This could be interesting. '"
"We didn't have incense in the Sanctified Brethren. Some people used cologne, but it wasn't required."
![[thumbnail: Humorist Garrison Keillor...]](/ENS/photographs/thumbnails/88076_thb.jpg) |