My New Friend

My New Friend, Russ Ringsak

Russ Ringsak is the truck driver for the Prairie Home Companion radio show. He hauls the famous prairie homeplace set from one end of the country to another and back home to Minnesota. He is also an entertaining writer and maintains a blog on the Prairie Home website. Garrison Keillor counts on Russ to do a good bit of research for him in towns they visit. He also performs triage duties on the many messages passed along to Garrison from audience members. He chooses the most critically entertaining and rushes them over to Garrison.

I happened onto Russ's blog over a month ago and wrote about it then. You may remember that Russ treated me to a pair of free tickets to the show in Columbus. What a hoot! It was a great show, we had great seats, and afterwards we got to attend the big shot reception and rub elbows with sound effects guru Fred Newman and his LaGrange relatives. After hunting around a bit we found Russ out at his beautiful red truck. We gave him a hastily gathered poke of goodies from Piggly Wiggly -- Vidalia onions, some Stiver's Best Corn Meal from right here in Rome GA, some Moon Pies, and such. And we talked for a few minutes.

If you'll listen to the entire segment 4 of the show you'll hear some folks explaining the second person plural pronoun -- with which Yankees have difficulty. I like to think maybe my letter to Russ influenced that segment.

Now Russ has written another blog post and mentions his new friend, Terrell Shaw. I am flattered.

Thanks for everything, Russ!