An Evening with Tom and Garrison

One of our favorite radio shows is in Seattle this weekend: A Prairie Home Companion, which broadcasts Saturdays on NPR. The local station arranged a fund raiser Thursday evening which was to include an informal question-and-answer session with the show's host, Garrison Keillor, and local celebrity chef Tom Douglas. We found out about this early and managed to get tickets. Tom was bringing the wine and hors d'oeuvres...sign us up!

It was a great evening. The event was much smaller than we had expected, there couldn't have been more than 150 people there. There were drinks and bites for about a half hour, and Garrison and Tom were milling around and chatting with the attendees. Vicki and I didn't strike up conversations, but had we had fun watching some of the others snapping pictures and asking for autographs. We caught a glance of Garrison holding out some lady's disposable camera to take a picture of the two of them together. The food, of course, was incredible.

When the questions and answers started, Garrison naturally took the mic and started quizzing Tom about his career and about northwest cuisine. Turns out when Tom is interviewing a new chef for a job, one of his questions is, "what would you prepare for a date night if you wanted to get lucky?" Garrison's answer was "nothing, I'd rather she be hungry."

The questions from the audience ranged from the insightful ("How much of the Prairie Home Companion sketches are scripted, and how much is improvisation?") to the outright absurd ("What do the two of you think about global warming?") We learned that Tom's favorite thing to cook is crab cakes, and Garrison's is sweet corn fresh from the garden (2 minutes to the pot, max). Tom started his career in Seattle because as a young chef he was on a cross-country road trip and this is where his car broke down. Garrison once lived in Copenhagen and finds it difficult to carry on small-talk in Danish.


Tomorrow we're going to the live weekly performance! We did this once before in Charlottesville and it was a lot of fun.