I grew up listening to public radio. The theme songs of “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered” are indelibly imprinted on my brain and will remain so long after Alzheimer’s ablates my grandchildren’s names from my memory. Nina Totenberg, Daniel Schoor, and Corey Flintoff accompanied me on carpool rides to and from school. And every Saturday evening when it got dark—provided the family wasn’t dodging an early Sunday wake-up call by attending five-thirty mass— my mother was making dinner and my father was up in his den and my brother and I were playing with whatever toys we’d wheedled my mother into purchasing for us that afternoon at Wal-Mart (or, at that time and in a very specific regional cross-section of the Midwest, Alco or Pamida).* And the radio would be invariably tuned to “A Prairie Home Companion”—Garrison Keillor’s voice becoming, over the years, as familiar as a relative’s, a reassuring layer of warm ambient noise that signalled the winding down of every kid’s favorite day of the week, the Saturday morning sugar highs yielding to the dusk before Sunday’s incipient dread that school was just around the corner.

On Monday, I began my semester-long tenure as one of the teaching assistants for the course that Garrison Keillor is teaching. So it’s not a little surreal to hear that same voice—a cornerstone of my childhood whose invocation “It’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon” usually meant that dinner was almost ready—saying things as quotidian “Can you help me hook up my laptop?” or “Grade these for clarity and content.” There’s a distinction between the person and the persona that gets blurred. When you see a television or film personality in real life, they always look different than they do on the screen; when you hear a radio personality speak in person, they sound exactly the same. I guess this should come as no surprise, but it takes some getting used to. Working for the guy might diminish some of my nostalgia for Saturday evenings of my childhood, but it probably still beats doing yardwork for the folks at “Marketplace.”

* (I have a specific memory of being in the third grade, before homework blighted my weekend evenings, and playing with the GI Joe action figures I’d gotten that day. They were the Cobra Twins, Tomax and Xamot [get it?]—an identical pair who, as I’m sure you’ll remember, could only be distinguished by the sinister-looking scar on one of their faces—I can’t remember which. They were packaged together and their “fun accessory” was a tiny zipline that essentially amounted to a piece of thread with a tiny piece of plastic for them to grasp with their rigidly-posed hands. You could tie one end of the zipline to, say, a chair, and tie the other end to … well, another chair, and those little plastic mercenary bastards could traverse that eighteen inches with speed and panache.)