Whatever your secret artistic longings may be. Interpretive flute? Abstract pet portraits? By all means, follow your bliss. Just promise to hold onto to your day job.

No, I mean it.

Appreciates and desires honest criticism. He wouldn't want you to come to his dance recital and pretend you liked it when you didn't.

Anyone who needs incessant insincere praise of their work is a child or a pretender not a real artist.

...and she works in a bar

Where the drummers and drug dealers drink...

She drinks while she works, to put up with the jerks

And the smoke and the noise and the stink...

Her eyebrows are black as the alley out back,

But her hair is as bright as a trumpet...

She's a maiden no more, but she's nobody's whore,

She's a tease, she's a sleeze, she's a strumpet...

Ever spring, I remember my old pal Star, and I wish I were playing drums in her bar again.

This is exactly why I joined the Really Terrible Orchestra of the Triangle (rtoot.org) I get to play 1st violin, an impossibility in a real orchestra, and when I ask friends how they liked the concert they can answer "it was terrible" without a twinge of guilt.

Garrison Keillor strikes again and nails it! Such seemingly simple words about fundamental things, perfect example of art!

If only you had captured and relayed the true narrowness of the hate filled minds clouding Abilene, Texas

I think you're already there, Hon....

Most Americans hate their jobs, that's for damned sure. So I'd agree that there's a "vast tide" of people out there who'd rather be doing something they consider more meaningful than whatever they're currently doing.

But that's about as far as I'm willing to travel on this train, sir. The economy is not sour because American workers aspire to better work. Rather, the economy is sour because of technical reasons having to do with global finance, mispricing of risk, and political mismanagement of almost every developed country in the world. None of these things has to do with dental hygienists' desires to become poets.

This article seems to suggest that Americans should do the "responsible" thing by diligently toting their bales and forsaking their airy, impractical dreams. But that is a potent prescription for permanent stagnation.

This country owes all of its success to the American dreamer mindset. And that mindset is a precious commodity. In Europe, people just accept things as they are -- they'll toil away with those bales, year in and year out, dissatisfied but stoically silent. In the States, people will get fed up with the bales and go build machines to carry their bales for them. Or devise ways of getting rid of bales altogether. That innovation is the very essence of economic growth; to kill it would be a tragedy of historical proportions.

Just yesterday, I played hookey ("ie"? just "y"?) from my Lower Calling to finish my first novel. Now to get someone to buy it...

One reason the economy is so sour is that nobody wants to tote barges or lift bales, they want to be edgy and multilayered and express their anguish in some colorful and inexplicable way.

Say what?! There are many reasons why the economy is so sour, but a lack of people willing to do grunt work ain't one of them. In fact, there's a surplus of such people, which is why The Man hires illegal immigrants and pays them a pittance and houses them in filthy over-crowded trailers.

But yes, many of us would rather be doing something else. I'd rather be running an animal sanctuary. Be an artist? Well, I do have some screenplays if you'd be willing to pass them along...

First, a disclaimer - I am, I guess, an artist/artisan. I have not held a "regular job" in close to forty years, I actually have my works in many private collections and a few major museums such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. If anyone thinks that being an artist/writer/musician is some sort of easy, carefree, exciting life on a day to day basis they are deluded. Art, craft, writing, music are all hard, demanding and often tedious jobs themselves. However, this is not to say that the payoffs, in satisfaction and feeling of accomplishment and joy are insubstantial.

That said, I am reminded of a Jules Pfeiffer (remember him?) cartoon of decades ago. It shows an artist, dressed in a smock and beret, painting in his studio before his easel with his palette and brush in hand.

"I'm an artist," he says in the first panel. "All day long I paint."

"Every day, I paint" he continues," dabbing at the canvas.

"But that's not what I really want to do," the cartoon character says as he turns to the reader.

"What I really want to do is sell shoes."

In the next panel the artist looks out forlornly, silent.

At last he returns to the painting and with hunched shoulders sighs, "The world should make a place for a shoe salesman."

No further comment.

Dammit, Garrison, now you've got me wondering. Our dear late mother, who'd be 105 in June, has been gone for 10 years. She bore and raised 4 sons & 4 daughters during the Great Depression. Though she had graduated from a 2 year Teacher's College (now UWSP in central Wisconsin) and taught for a spell, we never suspected that she may have had an earlier life which did not include the stuff of housewifery.

There are, however, faded photographs of a younger woman in the mid 1920's, dressed in the flapper fashions of the day who did have a life of which we know little. Come to think of it, she was more broad-minded than most of her contemporaries and I'd like to think that she may have been somewhat of a hellion before she embarked on the life which she so faithfully stuck with. She died at her eldest daughter's home, still of sound mind, and I no doubt pleasant memories.

She never mentioned being in a circus but who knows.... I regret now that we did not ask.