“I understand our audience includes wolves,” opened satirist and radio personality Garrison Keillor a the McKimmon center Sunday afternoon. He dressed plainly save his bright red socks and shoes, and his calling out to the Wolfpack received much woofing. A man in the audience conceitedly yells “and a ram,” giving Keillor pause. He dryly pointed out “I’ve never heard rams make that sound before.”Garrison Keillor is the host of “A Prairie Home Companion,” a long standing program of National Public Radio known for its folksy music, gentle and intellectually rich satire and duets about powder milk biscuits. He is also the writer of the popular “Lake Woebegone Days” series, whose happy topics include “men who have grown old and, in their dying, realize they’ve missed the boat.”Keillor himself is one of the great personalities of our culture. He has a way of stringing together multiple jokes, many of which are very dark and disarming, and yet maintaining a kind of quiet, bookish composure. He doesn’t even read past the very first sentence of the book he’s supposed to be plugging.”If you are an intellectual person, then libraries are your last hope, because this is how you will learn to put yourself to sleep at night,” Keillor notes. At 66, Keillor has no delusions about the slow downfall of his kind of radio program or his style of writing. “I lie there in bed and have a vision of the future, and in that future, someday, a young person will be walking past a library shelf with my book on it. He reaches to take it, and in my vision I’m rooting for him not to put it back.”One of the defining parts of Garrison Keillor, the man and the character, is his childhood in Minnesota, which he spent without electricity among poor, God- and change-fearing people, where “if the [hymn] was not about Jesus or the hope of salvation, it was usually murder ballads. And in church there wasn’t piano accompaniment, because [our church] didn’t see pianos mentioned in the Bible, so church sounded much like how Irish fisherwomen would sound mourning their dead.””My people were dark people, and out of this background you become a writer. Wrestling with words is all you need for entertainment. You would not need music if you were thrown in a dungeon, because you could write about your dungeon and do this until you finally expire.”I had asked him about his experience working on the film “A Prairie Home Companion,” the last film directed by the late, great Robert Altman. He said that “Altman was such a maverick, an iconoclast. [After surviving WWII], if a studio wouldn’t give him the money for his movie, he’d just make it cheap.”Garrison Keillor, on stage and in person, was a real treat. And if you think “real treat” sounds geeky, you should have heard what I said when I first met him, preserved here in all its glory. “Thank you so much for coming here, and being so entertaining and saying all these entertaining things, because you’re so entertaining.”Yes, now Garrison Keillor knows what a big giant dork I am.