Keillor told The Associated Press in a follow-up e-mail Wednesday that he’ll be 70 in the spring of 2013, “and that seems like a nice round number.”

“The reason to retire is to try to avoid embarrassment; you ought to do it before people are dropping big hints. You want to be the first to come up with the idea. You don’t want to wait until you trip and fall off the stage,” Keillor told the AP.

For the first time this season, “A Prairie Home Companion” had a guest host on Jan. 15, when singer and fiddler Sara Watkins of the band Nickel Creek hosted the show from St. Paul’s Fitzgerald Theater, with Keillor appearing as a featured guest. Keillor said at the time that he had never gotten to see the show himself and wanted “to stand in the back of the hall and watch for a few minutes.”

Keillor has ruminated before about retirement. In 1987, he surprised his fans by quitting “A Prairie Home Companion.” But he returned to the airwaves two years later with a new touring show, “American Radio Company of the Air,” and a few years after that he returned to St. Paul and reclaimed “A Prairie Home Companion” as the name of his variety show.

In 2009, Keillor suffered a minor stroke but was back on air three weeks later. He created “A Prairie Home Companion” in 1974 and celebrated the show’s 35th anniversary in 2009 with a show in central Minnesota’s Stearns County, which inspired Keillor’s mythical hometown of Lake Wobegon — “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average.” The show is now broadcast on nearly 600 public radio stations and heard by more than 4 million people each week.

——

Online:

AARP Bulletin: http://www.aarp.org/bulletin

A Prairie Home Companion: http://www.PrairieHome.org

Then something really kind of poetic happened, the kind of thing that if somebody wrote it into a story of theirs for workshop, the class would totally not believe. Several months before I left my home to go off into the middle of nowhere and pursue my dream, I fell head over heels in love. (I know, I know, you totally saw it coming.)

So I moved, but I flew back a lot and he flew here a lot. Meanwhile, I found out that my dream locale wasn’t so dreamy. I’m not sure that I deserve to be here. I can’t see that my work is getting any better. I feel like my classmates are all better writers than I am and it doesn’t help that most of them have odious personalities. I have continued to write, which in my mind is better than giving up, but I find myself constantly thinking I’m crap and wondering if I should give up this ghost.

Also, my significant other has made the decision to move and be with me. This is a big sacrifice on his part, but I am very happy about it and think it’s going to be very good. We talk a lot about getting married and I know we will. Our relationship makes me happier than I’ve ever been in my life, happier than I ever thought I could be. In fact, it’s one of those things that makes me rethink writing even more. I love this person way more than I could ever love writing, or be good at it. And ultimately my life-love relationship should and will trump any of my personal professional goals.

So what am I doing here? I’m going to stay and finish my degree, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about never writing a word afterward. Does that make me a terrible person? Sometimes I am haunted by my adolescent obsession with being a writer and I feel like I am giving up on a part of me I might some day regret. On the other hand, I look at the sentences I string together, and by God, they suck! And yet I still send stories out to magazines, hoping they will think they’re good and want to publish them.

I really want you to publish this letter, but part of me knows that if anybody here reads it, they’ll know exactly who wrote it. And the last thing I want them to know is that I think they’re all better than me. Especially because I got a special fellowship that they probably think I didn’t deserve.

Maybe I’m just coming to terms with the agony of being a writer, an agony that may be too much for me to handle. Or maybe I never was a writer in the first place.

Confused Student Writing Pathetic Fiction

Dear Confused Student,

Thank you for writing. I am glad you are going to finish the program. No matter what you decide to do later, it is good to finish the program and get your degree.

I went to graduate school in creative writing as an egotistical person. I was concerned with whether people thought I was brilliant.

This brilliance was a brittle thing, a bright, cold shell I had made in junior high to wear to school and around town like a gown of dazzling and invisible power to keep predators at bay; it was a fast-thinking thing, a mean, clever thing, a way to stay aloft and aloof. I took it with me when I left home. I used it to not learn anything.

But you get older and defeat forces you to learn things you didn’t think you needed to know, or didn’t want to learn or didn’t think were important, or thought were beneath you.

Here is the big main thing I learned: My writing is not here to support me. I am here to support my writing.

How it came about was I endured some failure as a writer trying to make money as a writer, and had to work at other things for five years. During that time I wrote but not for money. I wrote on the subway, alone, in a notebook, sitting by myself in the crowd. I wrote to save myself.

It turned out that writing to save myself was the best way to write. Here is why, I think: Our writing is the voice of a person who is innocent, powerless and in need of protection; our writing is the voice of a person who needs to be heard as he or she really is. It is deep stuff is what I mean. And shocking as it is to say, the person who is writing this — the person I am today — is the kind of person toward whom I once would have leveled pitiless scorn.

So here is me now: I never finished that program. I left some minor details unfinished. I began to drink and take drugs and lost my writer’s community and lost my discipline and my aesthetic. I went down, way down. I disappeared. There were reasons, technical reasons, as there are technical reasons when a bridge collapses: Certain struts weakened and certain bolts were sheared, certain winds arose, certain loads were exceeded. But as in the collapse of a bridge, the technical cause is only part of the story: The effect is a story, too — the people who were hurt, the millions in damage, the loss.

The loss is what I am talking about: loss as teacher.

So what I learned in my trek from brilliant insufferable little grad school shit to person with enough humility to sit quietly in a room with dogs — and patiently let them nose my hands as I try to work the keyboard — is that writing is not about face. It is about soul. It is a tool for becoming who you are.

This is not something easily taught or easily learned, because it is not much fun to believe and act on, and it does not promise to bring sparkly fame. It is just something that has become true for me. Along the way, two things have happened. My old school has reached out to me and I am in the process of redoing the paperwork in order to be awarded the master’s degree I started nearly 30 years ago. And I have bumbled into this creative form that was not taught in graduate school but seems congenial to my spirit, an epistolary form not entirely new — I learned of its possibility by watching Garrison Keillor do it — but new enough not to be taught in grad school.

This perhaps will change.

So finish your degree and take care of your writing as you would take care of an animal or a child. Do not send it out into the world to do an adult’s job. Just take care of it and, in its own way, it will take care of you.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

What? You want more?

Those trademarks are so vivid that some longtime Altman fans (and certainly many Altman detractors) may claim that the 81-year-old director is just retracing the territory that made him a maverick in the ’70s. What’s more, “A Prairie Home Companion” is about the very last performance of a radio variety show — a show that has miraculously survived for years even in the age of television, a show that, as one character puts it, has been on the air “since Jesus was in the third grade.” For that reason alone, some moviegoers may see the picture as an act of desperation: Altman the outmoded cowpoke is getting ready to shamble into the sunset, so why not make a movie about a form of entertainment that’s practically outmoded?

But there’s a difference between desperation and melancholy defiance. And “A Prairie Home Companion,” even with its aura of gentle amiability, is defiant to the core. As both Keillor and Altman have conceived it, this is a movie that lives squarely in the modern world: Far from blissfully ignoring the context of the culture around it, it’s painfully aware of that culture’s realities. This is a messy, rambling picture; in places, it’s maddening. And yet its lackadaisical, conversational quality is something that’s missing almost completely from contemporary mainstream filmmaking. So many of the big modern movies feel blueprinted to within an inch of their lives, which is not to say that they’re well-written: Sometimes they feel like moving storyboards, pictures that have been mapped out and executed according to a marketing plan, instead of being first made and then marketed. In a world of giant budgets, of endings that are rewritten and reshot three or four times in order to appease test audiences, the kind of improvisatory exploration that Altman has specialized in has become much harder to do.

“A Prairie Home Companion” feels its way along, and trusts we’re right there with it. More than anything, Altman seems to be yearning for casualness: for movies that have the feel of life unfolding before our eyes, for movies filled with half-finished conversations that, even in their truncated state, manage to say it all. Those are the kinds of movies — “M*A*S*H,” “Nashville” and, the most passionate of all, “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” — that Altman used to make, used to be able to make. (And even amid the freedom of the ’70s, they were a risk.) “A Prairie Home Companion” isn’t in that league. It’s a sweet picture, enjoyable enough if you simply choose to glide along its surface. But the implicit whisper behind “A Prairie Home Companion” is that Altman doesn’t want either the moviemaking or the moviegoing experience to be scripted to the point of lifelessness. And by the movie’s end, that whisper has become a lion’s roar.

Here, Keillor plays not himself but a version of himself who goes by the name G.K., a variety-show host who’s part ringleader, part ladies’ man, and part wry, observant bystander. The show, like the markedly more successful one Keillor hosts in real life, originates from St. Paul. It’s a blend of storytelling, musical performances and old-timey commercials with a vaguely dada flair (“Brought to you by the Association of Federated Organizations: Somewhere there’s an organization that’s right for you”). A Texas radio executive (known, ominously, as Axeman, and played by Tommy Lee Jones) has bought the station that airs the program, and he’s about to pull the plug on it. The story — not really a plot so much as a continuous unfolding of moments, and a relay of interactions between the characters — takes place on the show’s last night, as the cast and crew assemble for the last time.

Some of them, like the wonderful, fluttery character played by Marylouise Burke, known as Lunch Lady, just can’t believe the show is ending; others, like the sister act played by Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin (their names are Yolanda and Rhonda Johnson), are wistful but vaguely resigned, as if they feel lucky the show survived even as long as it did; and others, like Maya Rudolph’s cranky, briskly efficient and heavily pregnant assistant stage manager Molly, just want the show to run smoothly, whether it’s the last night or not. And for most of them — from the seemingly uncomplicated singing-cowboy act, Dusty and Lefty (Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly), to the crotchety-sweet croaky crooner Chuck Akers (played by the wonderful veteran actor L.Q. Jones) — the routine of showmanship is what they love most about their work. They’re not about to let their last night of performing get mired in sentimentality.

Commerce may be what’s bringing this show to an end. But is the intrusion of commerce a fate worse than death? It’s something of a minor spoiler to tell you (and please stop reading here if you’re sensitive to such things) that one of the spectators watching this last show from the wings is an angel who looks like a woman — a Dangerous Woman, in fact, and that’s the name she goes by. Dangerous Woman is played by Virginia Madsen, a luminous bombshell in a white trenchcoat: With her down-to-earth breathlessness, she’s a spiritual descendent of Barbara Stanwyck. Dangerous Woman has come to earth on a mission, and not even the down-on-his-luck ’40s-style gumshoe, Guy Noir (Kevin Kline, in a performance of supremely offhanded elegance), who handles security for the show, can stop her — although he’s so smitten with her that he doesn’t really try to, anyway.

So there you have it: An 81-year-old filmmaker gives us a movie in which the Angel of Death appears as a film noir goddess. The concept alone is a good indicator of how well Keillor’s and Altman’s sensibilities mesh. (It probably doesn’t hurt that both are Midwesterners.) “Youth” also makes an appearance in “A Prairie Home Companion” in the guise of Lola Johnson (Lindsay Lohan), Yolanda’s disgruntled teenage daughter, a writer of florid death poetry who will, on this last night of the show, get a chance to perform for the first time. The old guard must give way to the new.

Whatever “A Prairie Home Companion” has to say about aging, about death, about the mutability of art, is never stated outright: And yet it’s all there in the picture’s rambunctious collage of moods. (Ed Lachman’s cinematography unifies those shifting tones beautifully.) Altman and Keillor aren’t interested in planting their ideas; they’re content to let them drift, from background to foreground and back again. The movie suggests that our most random thoughts, the ones that cross our minds in dumb, meandering patterns when we’re supposed to be doing something serious and important, actually are important. There’s a lovely backstage scene in which Yolanda and Rhonda chatter about their career, trading non sequiturs that interlock with a surreal “click.” Lola sits nearby, rolling her eyes. And spontaneously, Streep’s Yolanda begins singing: “Softly and tenderly, Jesus is calling,” goes the tune — it’s an old Methodist hymn, one that’s frequently played during the altar call, and also at funerals. As Yolanda sings, in her quavery, pale-amber voice, she rolls her chair over toward her sister and wraps her arms around her. Streep and Tomlin are lovely here — they seem to be giving one performance, jointly, a kind of Frick-and-Frack harmonized improvisation. The friction between the characters throws off sparks of love.

Keillor, the movie’s master of ceremonies, isn’t so much an actor as a presence, but he’s an unassumingly mighty one. With his high, brainy forehead and question-mark eyes, he looks a bit like one of the Brownies, the mischief makers and doers of good deeds drawn by the Victorian-era cartoonist Palmer Cox. His G.K. listens, half-seduced and half-bemused, as the Dangerous Woman explains that, before she became an angel, she was a big fan of his show. In fact, she tells him, she was actually listening on the night she died, while she was driving to meet her lover: She laughed so hard at one of his dumb jokes that she swerved off the road. “Because of your story, I lost control and I died,” she tells him, brightly, as if she were writing him a standard fan letter. “So you killed me in a way. Isn’t that interesting?” G.K. responds the way any sensible person would: By raising an eyebrow — because what could he possibly say?

That’s a wonderful, sideways-slanted fragment, the kind of semi-meaningless exchange that Altman likes to use to get us, and himself, thinking. Altman, his fairly recent heart transplant notwithstanding, knows he can’t go on forever, and “A Prairie Home Companion” is the kind of corny-joke memorial that a director responsible for lines like “If a frog had wings, he wouldn’t bump his ass so much” (from “McCabe & Mrs. Miller”) might concoct for himself.

Altman has become a symbol of the old guard to younger moviegoers who are sick of hearing the old-timers (and older critics) go on about his glory days. I hate to frame the argument as a disparity between the old and the young. I don’t believe the number of moviegoers who truly care about movies has diminished that much since the ’70s. But the parameters of what we get to see, and how it’s presented to us, have changed drastically. For many lovers of movies, the Netflix queue has become the polar North of our moviegoing habits.

Given the range of movies being made in America today — along all the gradations of the indie scale, and sometimes even in Hollywood — it’s absurd to claim that the time for doing great work is over. But doing great work, and getting it seen, is certainly harder than ever, and I believe Altman is facing that reality head-on in “A Prairie Home Companion,” not so much for his sake, but for ours. He knows that after he’s gone, that’s one of the challenges we’ll be left with.

One of the things that has always bothered me about the critics locked in the “golden age of the ’70s” mentality is that they ended up treating filmmakers like Altman and Scorsese and Coppola as the end of something, rather than a beginning. The message to everyone born after 1960 was, “You shoulda been there, kids — it was great. But it’s all over now.”

But even if Altman, in “A Prairie Home Companion,” seems wistful for the days when filmmaking was done, and watched, differently, I suspect he doesn’t have as much reverence for the ’70s as many critics do. His sense of community is too strong to want to shut people out of experience — as a filmmaker (and even as a maker of sometimes not-so-great movies), hasn’t his lifelong goal been to draw them into it?

And so, late in “A Prairie Home Companion,” by the time the whole ensemble takes the stage to sing “In the Sweet By and By” — a song that is, in the strictest sense, about moving optimistically toward the afterlife, but one that could also be simply about striding toward the uncertainty of the future — it becomes clear that this movie isn’t just a lament for the past, a case of an old man making a movie about olden times. Altman, along with his cast, is singing for all of us, for those of us who continue to love movies no matter how often we get burned. Maybe we’re dinosaurs. But we’re all dinosaurs, together.

After the wardrobe inspection, the casting director hops onto the chair again and announces a raffle. Theater tickets! Gift certificates! A signed jersey from the Minnesota Vikings! This is starting to feel less like Hollywood and more like a church picnic. Maybe the filmmakers researched Minnesotans and discovered this is what we enjoy. They want to make us feel at home. But we don’t want home. We want Hollywood.

By hour three, the holding area looks like an airport gate several hours after the plane should have left. Extras of all ages and sizes are sprawled across the floor. The beehive woman rolls her chair toward me, rips open a bag of potato chips, and throws it on the floor with a force I find excessive and vaguely alarming. The extras have divided themselves into little groups: Retired Policemen, Teenage Kids Who Look Like Models, Trendy Moms in Denim Jackets. I’m hungry, woozy and certain I’m in the process of catching airborne diseases from breathing the exhalations of every person in this room. I scavenge the snack area, but all that’s left is an empty bag of pretzels and half a glass of Gatorade. I picture myself living and dying in the extras’ holding area, begging pretzel crumbs off a phalanx of coiffed women in fashionable outerwear.

I’m sitting in this windowless, hangarlike room, in downtown St. Paul, Minn., at 3 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon, because for the last two years, I worked as a writer for the radio show “A Prairie Home Companion.” Garrison Keillor, who hosts the weekly mix of live music and sketch comedy, had been writing the show for almost three decades when, a few years ago, he decided to hire some writers to assist. My job was to create new scripts and edit, or “punch up,” scripts that others had written — namely, Garrison himself. I wrote jokes, inserted topical humor and created realistic dialogue for teenagers. I liked the work, and the miniadrenaline rush I felt in the precious few hours before each show, poring over scripts to come up with new jokes about juvenile delinquents or exploding dinosaur eggs. But after two years, I decided I wanted to try out life as a freelancer, for “Prairie Home” and elsewhere. The instant I left, Robert Altman and a fleet of Hollywood royalty descended on St. Paul to make a movie version of the radio show — our radio show — a special gift to me from the angel of bad timing.

It’s not as if I imagined Bob and I would bond over lutefisk sandwiches at Mickey’s Diner, trading stories about “the biz” as I offered him a sip of my malted milkshake. For one thing, our “bizzes” were different. He worked in glamorous locations all over the world; I worked in a squat brown office building in residential St. Paul. He directed some of the great actors of our time; I directed the cleanup at our annual Halloween potluck. Nonetheless, it seemed like cruel irony that just as I departed for greener pastures, a Technicolor one would drop into my backyard.

At the same time, I was skeptical. The movie, which opens June 9, was supposed to be a “behind-the-scenes look” at the radio show. But frankly, most of the behind-the-scenes work takes place in an office filled with copy machines, white boards and beige carpeting — not exactly a filmic vista. Backstage is a similarly non-photogenic mess of cables and old PCs. During the live shows, actors read from scripts while a sound-effects artist crunches Styrofoam plates, and Garrison tells stories while sitting on a small red stool. The show is built for the ear, not the eye — the whole world of the radio show is transmitted through sound effects, music and the human voice. It’s a world, but a world in sound, and it lives in the imagination of the listener. A film? I thought. Pshaw. Then one day, the phone rang: It was the “Prairie Home” staff, offering me a role as an extra in the movie.

I’ve never been a movie fanatic, but within hours of the phone call, I was printing out a blurry head shot to bring to the casting office. No big deal, I assured my family and friends. I’m doing this for my family and friends, I explained to the casting people. Neither was true. I accepted the role. This, as they say in the movies, is my story.

Most of the extras are out of work, retired, self-employed or on vacation. (A freelance writer, I fit into all these categories.) Near me, a group of moms are gathered in a semicircle around a high school student in a clingy coral top. They coo over her, peppering her with questions about her friends, her classes, her boyfriend. Across from them, a retired policeman spots an old acquaintance and updates him on the last five years of his life, which have included the death of his son. The policeman is accustomed to dealing with difficult situations; he’s witnessed the way people’s lives change in an instant. “You get those calls all the time,” he says, “but you never think it’s going to be your own son.” I strike up a conversation with a college student who wants to be a doctor. “I’ve already delivered a baby,” he says. “I was at a family picnic in a park. We heard screams, and I just rushed over. I’d seen babies born on TV, but still, it was unreal.”

All at once, a crackling instruction comes through the casting director’s headset, and a woman with dyed black hair climbs onto the folding chair and shouts, “Amber’s group! Amber’s group! Come to the stairs!” A whisper courses through the crowd. Twenty of us rise from our seats and crowd onto the landing. As we walk across the street to the theater where the filming is taking place, a mom sees Kevin Kline, one of the movie’s stars. “I just had a heart attack,” she whispers to her friend, “and I’m just going to keep on having them.”

We shuffle gingerly though the theater’s front doors, tiptoe past a woman painting a mural in the lobby, and file into the house. This velvet and gold theater has been my home turf for two years, but now it’s unrecognizable. A long platform extends into the middle of the house, and dozens of black-clad crew members scurry back and forth between the platform and the stage. Along one aisle, a pair of cameramen cruise up and down a track on what looks like a giant riding lawnmower. Black headsets perch on the seats like oversize tropical beetles, and a 20-foot arm with a camera on one end swoops back and forth across the width of the house. The Guys’ All-Star Shoe Band — the four musicians who appear every week on the radio show — are huddled in the middle of the stage like stunned tourists on Hollywood Island.

We’re barely seated when a voice booms: “Richie, are you ready to fight your way out of this one?” Richie, the pianist and bandleader for the Guys’ All-Star Shoe Band, cups his hands around his mouth and shouts back: “Yes, sir!” I turn around to see a fortress of monitors and consoles in the far back corner of the theater. Production assistants buzz around its perimeter, entering and exiting like worker bees bringing gifts of honey to the queen. Altman must be in there, I think, and for a moment I picture the Wizard of Oz, a tiny man behind an enormous letterbox screen. Just then, a sturdy-looking man with a rug of salt-and-pepper hair emerges from the fortress and walks out onto the platform in front of us. He turns out to be Vebe Borge, the assistant director. “You’re the audience,” Vebe instructs, “so we want you to clap. But try not to make any noise — we’ll dub over it later. And don’t stand up — the boom will knock you over.” We practice clapping without making noise, stopping our hands the split second before they hit each other.

Then there’s a shout of “Let’s go!” from the fortress, and Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin strut onstage, their costumes draped lavishly over them, their hair glinting in 20 shades of gold and copper. The crowd gasps — there they are. No fanfare, no minions, just a couple of human-size people standing 10 feet in front of us. Their characters, Rhonda and Yolanda Johnson, are sisters, and singers in a family band. They laugh and twirl and poke at each other (“Where’d ya get that Kleenex? Down your front?”), all the while running through their lines. Their teeth gleam under the lights. I have never seen teeth so luminous. Meryl delivers a story about their dear mother, a poor washerwoman whose smile was as “wide as the Mississippi River…” She pauses for effect and then continues: “Down at the mouth.” Meryl seems like an embodiment of womanhood itself, and even her description of a river sends a frisson of erotic glee through the crowd.

And then they begin to sing.

Meryl belts out the first half of the song, Lily joins in, and now they’ve got their arms around each other and they’re swaying and grinning, their voices rich and mellow, the notes pouring out and washing over us. Forty eyes and ears are focused on one thing only. And all at once, we’re not extras playing an audience, we are the audience, and when Meryl croons, “Oh, the world is a world of rivers, flowing to the sea  And oh that mighty Mississippi  that’s where I want to be!” I’m thinking: Yes, Meryl! It is a world of rivers! They are flowing to the sea! Yes! Yes! And when they fling out their arms and belt the last bars, we leap to our feet, cheering wildly, whistling, clapping, waving our hands over our heads. We’re cheering for the performance, for the actors, for the fantasy, for ourselves. “OK,” says Vebe, walking out onto the stage. “But next time try not to make any noise.”

Later, I turn around to see a bunch of regular “Prairie Home” musicians in the back of the theater. Most of them have been recruited to play bit parts in the movie, and they’re all dressed in costume, sitting quietly with their instruments. Among them is Spider John Koerner, a regular guest on the radio show who is often cited as one of the most original performers in American folk music. He almost shouts his spare songs, and he speeds up and slows down to push and pull listeners through the music. Bonnie Raitt and Bob Dylan credit him as an influence; his playing style is so unique that even traditional songs sound like his own. Now he’s leaning forward in his seat, watching actors perform onstage. They’re stomping their feet and telling jokes, just like he does in real life. With costumes and scripts, they’re stepping into roles that mimic the life he actually lives. In the half-dark, I can’t quite make out the expression on his face — amusement, surprise, a flicker of weariness? I’ve been seduced by the performance — to me, it’s a glammed-up version of the creaky show I know so well. But I’m not the one being portrayed onstage. And I wonder if seeing strangers prance and joke like this makes him feel a little more vaporous in his skin, a little less solid. Spider John sees me watching him, and our eyes meet for a moment. Then, we both turn back to the stage and watch as our world is turned into fiction.

It’s day two, and we’re shooting the big finale — a couple of solos, a group singalong and a big bow. As I make my way past the cafeteria to the extras’ holding area, the beehive woman totters past me on heels, and the posse of moms scurries up the stairs. I’m about to follow them when I witness a scene like something out of Garrison’s fever dreams: Everyone who has ever been associated with the radio show, in its 30-year history, is eating lunch together in a giant cafeteria. Musical guests from the 1970s, current technical crew, radio actors and Garrison himself choose lunchmeats from a long buffet line. Sue Scott, an actor on the radio show who plays the makeup lady in the movie, is sitting next to Richie, the real-life bandleader. Richie is being followed around by the actual movie’s makeup lady, who is brandishing a foam wedge and powdering his bald head.

And then, into the middle of the cafeteria wander fictional characters from the radio show. Dusty and Lefty, the perpetually displaced cowboys from the sketch “The Lives of the Cowboys,” are walking around, life-size, in the form of John C. Reilly and Woody Harrelson. They amble through the lunch line in chaps and cowboy hats, looking as out of place as the characters in the sketch. Guy Noir, the bumbling private detective from the sketch “Guy Noir, Private Eye,” strides about in suspenders, in the form of Kevin Kline. He’s imperious, and he lifts his chin as he walks around the lunch tables.

Lunch ends, and all the extras shuffle into the theater to again play an audience, this time for what seems like all of Hollywood: Meryl and Lily, Woody and John, the diminutive Lindsay Lohan, Maya Rudolph from “Saturday Night Live.” Take after take, the mood onstage is upbeat — everyone’s whispering and laughing, or twittering around the piano. Lily Tomlin grabs a cowboy hat and plunks it on Lindsay Lohan’s head. John C. Reilly does rope tricks on the side of the stage. We cheer when he succeeds. We cheer when he fails. We love cheering, apparently, and he loves it, too. The cameras seem to be rolling or not rolling indiscriminately. Scripted laughter and genuine laughter blur into one another, and I can’t tell if we’re rehearsing, or shooting, or just goofing around. Are the actors acting like people having a good time, or are they actually having a good time? Are we? I have no idea.

The scene ends, and Meryl swoops across the stage, throws her arms around Garrison, and kisses him fully on the lips. The extras stare in disbelief. Was this for real? Was this ad-libbed? No one knows, and it doesn’t matter. “That’s good!” Altman shouts from the back of the theater. “And bring out the cowboy hat next time, too.”

Two weeks later, I go back to the set. There’s nothing for the extras to do, but I’ve heard they’ve built an entire office for Guy Noir, and I want to see it. The radio staff, I learn, has a sort of special status on the set; we’re walking relics, and the film crew looks at us with a sort of wary respect. “You work for the radio show?” they ask, squinting, like someone’s just pulled a set of vacuum tubes out of the storage closet. We’re living history, a precursor to this movie — and, as a radio show, to all movies. The film crew seems genuinely curious about us, the way you might be if Homo habilis knocked on your door.

Today the theater is empty except for a few strays like me and two flat-screen monitors hiked up on poles, with electrical tape marking the letterbox area. I slip into the wings, where the filming is taking place, and what I see before me is a shock. I’ve become accustomed to seeing fictional characters walking and talking, but now I’m standing in front of a meticulous physical rendering of Guy Noir’s office, the setting where each Guy Noir script begins. For the past two years, I’ve carried this office in my imagination. I’ve puzzled over the right sound effects — creaking drawers, ringing phones — and I’ve constructed scenes that occur inside it. Here, in front of me, is every physical detail, exactly as I’ve imagined it: crusty tape dispensers, Venetian blinds, a rusty fan blowing bits of paper. There’s an ancient metal mailbox, yellowing postcard pinups, and a few dusty fedoras hanging on the wall. A dim red light pokes from behind the blinds, like a stoplight shining from the street below. But rather than feeling like an intrusion into my world, it’s magical: This space is something I visualized completely, and here it is, in the flesh. Every inch of it fully described, fully realized. How strange, to wake up from a dream and find that it’s all been made real.

In live radio, the line between truth and fiction is impossible to ignore. The world of the radio show is obviously constructed: Headphones, microphones and scripts are all in plain sight. In fact, part of the thrill of watching live radio is seeing how the sounds that land in the ear as “true” are actually built. You can close your eyes and listen to a man walking through a rainy street or open them and watch the sound-effects artist splashing galoshes in a tray of water. You can listen to a married couple snuggling on the couch, or watch as two actors wearing headphones — and standing several feet away from each other — read from scripts. In radio, the performers and the audience are in on the joke together: The jig is up, as everyone can see. But movies are different: They rely on suspension of disbelief. Now, on this set, my disbelief is on the verge of disappearing entirely.

Then, Guy Noir enters the office, followed by Dusty and Lefty. And the fictional world of the radio show cranks to life. Guy Noir sits down, opens a desk drawer, and begins to roll a cigarette. Lefty strums a badly tuned guitar. Guy Noir chucks the cigarette and fiddles with his phone. Lefty begins to sing. I’m speechless; it’s as if the hours and years that have gone into writing, performing and listening to these characters — into, essentially, believing them — has finally made them real.

They’re ready to start filming. Kline blows his nose, and then leans forward for a nostril touch-up. The makeup lady scurries toward him and whips out a tiny sponge. The actors are about 5 feet away from me, and I haven’t cleared my spectatorship with anyone. I sidle up to a cluster of interns, hoping our matching black outfits will camouflage the fact that I have No Reason to Be There. An assistant to the assistant director walks over to where I’m standing. “Does everyone here know who everyone is?” he asks, looking directly at me.

The interns look at each other and shrug. I look down, suddenly fascinated by the pattern of bricks in the wall. One of the interns asks me if I’d like to have a folding chair closer to the set. She thinks I’m Someone. I’m not about to disabuse her of this notion. Oh, no, that’s OK, I say magnanimously, gesturing for someone else to take the chair.

The scene ends, and I walk into the lobby to scope out the snack options and run smack into the extras’ casting director. She looks surprised to see me. “Oh, hi,” I say, casually helping myself to a handful of dried fruit, “I’m just here to visit.” She smiles uncertainly. “Maybe it’s time to go,” I think, and steer myself out the door.

A Wednesday night the following week, I’m in downtown St. Paul for a freelance gig. It’s 11 p.m., and I’ve been working since early morning. Just for kicks, I walk past the theater to see if anything’s going on. The street outside is lit with powerful lamps, and the film crew is huddled near the theater’s doors. It’s the last night of filming. A large man with a fire hose is soaking the pavement to create the effect of rain. One of the interns recognizes me and shouts across the street, “Are you in this scene?” I haven’t eaten dinner, and I’m so exhausted I can barely stand up. The camera boom dips down toward me, then up. “Yes,” I shout back, “I’m in this scene.”

I head to the extras’ holding area to check in with the casting director. “You can be in the scene,” she says, glancing at my short sleeves, “but you’ll need a sweater.” I have no idea how I’m going to find a sweater at 11 p.m. in downtown St. Paul, but by some Hollywood magic, a woman who works in the box office wanders in and tells me she has a blue cardigan I can borrow. I follow her to the office, try on the sweater, and glance in the mirror. I’m about to be immortalized in a baggy, electric blue sweater with a large patch on the pocket in the shape of a globe. But there’s no time for vanity. I thank her profusely and dart back to the holding area.

All the regulars are here: the retired policeman, the trendy moms, the lady in the floppy hat with the self-love purse. Soon a big group of us is summoned down the steps and stationed across the street from the theater. It’s cold tonight, and the wet street makes it feel colder. We’re supposed to act like a crowd just arriving for the first time to watch the show. Some of us are instructed to smoke outside the theater, some are instructed to hang back near the fence. We attempt take after take; first we’re too clumped together, then we’re too fast. We’re having a hard time getting it right: We’re too enthusiastic, too quick to get to the front doors, not relaxed, the way a real crowd would be.

Finally, the assistant director is satisfied. He gestures to the cameramen and yells, “Go.” I leap off the curb and over a puddle, and hustle past the smokers and loiterers stationed outside. If you see the movie and the scene hasn’t been cut, I’m the one in the baggy blue sweater, ticket in my hand. The night is falsely bright, the street is falsely wet, and I’m dashing through the theater’s front doors like I’ve never been here before, like the night hasn’t even begun, like I’m about to see something wonderful.