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We're going to hold a drawing tomorrow all you have to do to qualify to get your name in the in the bin there is to call us you don't even have to make a membership pledge. And I think this is a particularly good deal for those of you who've been members right along and you know, we have our pledge Drive. So a lot of times, you know, you just feel left out. Well, here's a way to get involved and get your cell do yourself a favor. We hope when you call in you'll take out a membership renew your membership, maybe make an additional contribution but not necessary. Just give us a call and you will be eligible for the new iMac 1-800 to to 728 11 do give us a call here. Our volunteers are going to be standing by now. We're going to have to have an equivalent talk little bit, but don't be shy keep the phone's ringing. It's the only way we're going to be able to make our goals and those of you who listen to the station, you know, you ought to help pay for it. That's really the long and the short of it. So great. We are your constant companion and we need you right now. So give us a call one eight hundred two to seven 28:11 like to thank Caribou Coffee for donating coffee for our volunteers, you know, it turns out that one of America's best Riders is also one of America's Voracious readers Anna quindlen loves to read always has this spring. She was in the Twin Cities to talk about her love of reading and her new book how reading changed my life the premium at the $10 per month level Anna quindlen won a Pulitzer Prize for her work as a columnist for the New York Times during those years. She also wrote two bestselling novels object lessons and one true thing. She resigned from the times five years ago, but kept on writing finishing her third novel The critically acclaimed black and blue and now her latest work extolling the pleasures of reading. Anna quindlen was in the Twin Cities to speak at the library Foundation of Hennepin County's pen pals author lecture series. She spoke at the doth Assurance synagogue in Minnetonka during this first hour of midday will hear from Anna quindlen on the joy of reading over the noon hour. We'll be broadcasting the question and answer period that followed her speech to begin. Here's Anna quindlen. (00:04:03) First of all, let's get one piece of business over with all across this great country of ours in the last two months people have felt the need to tell me that I cut my hair. I know that. Second of all, we are going to keep secret from my family the venue in which I am appearing tonight because about three months ago. I appeared at a similarly large and I must say gorgeous synagogue in Short Hills, New Jersey not far from where my husband has is firm and the next day he heard from many people that it was packed to the rafters and that there had been more people than there had been for the high holidays and so for about a week my entire family felt the need to intone more popular than Yahweh any time they saw me. I will lie and tell them that I was in a standard-issue Auditorium tonight, but here's the news from the front because when I saw that I was speaking in a series sponsored by the library. I knew that the front for tonight's speech was very clear. Here's the big news from the front Quinn cravate and finished weathering Heights last week. Now, you don't know Quinn chromium, but along with Chris Crow bait and then Maria Crow bait and he is one of the three most important people in the world and him finishing weathering Heights is an event akin to his first step or his first word. Certainly his first book, which was Goodnight Moon. My eldest child is a chain reader like a chain smoker. He lights his next book from the barely dying Embers of the one he's just finished. So he immediately went from Emily Bronte to Kate Atkinson's behind the scenes at the Museum and finished that and went on to Morton Amos has the Rachel papers and my life is complete when the library of contemporary thought at random house asked me to write 15,000 words two years ago about a subject about which I was passionate the first thought that came to my mind the next morning when I was taking my morning walk was reading. There's no subject that I feel more strongly about than reading except for my children. My children reading that's the greatest thing on earth. I mean my ten-year-old daughter in a hammock reading and of Green Gables if I die and go to heaven. That's what it's going to be over and over again unto perpetuity. I remember that when I was in eighth grade, I went to take a scholarship test for a convent school and the essay part of the test began with this quotation. It is a far far better thing that I have done than I will ever do it is a far far better rest that I have gone to than I have ever known we all got together in the dining room afterwards all we girls who had taken the test and had tuna fish sandwiches and chocolate milk and some of the other girls started to talk about how they were perplexed by that quotation and they didn't know what it meant and they didn't know where it came for and not to put too strong a point on it. I knew at that moment pretty shortly that I'd won the scholarship. I mean at that point I couldn't even count how many times I'd gone up the steps of the guillotine with Sydney Carton as he went to that far far better rest at the end of A Tale of Two Cities. Like so many of the other ones he seemed like a real person to me like Heidi or Jay Gatsby or Elizabeth Bennet or Scarlett O'Hara or Dylan Scout more real than the real people that I knew one poem that I committed to memory in grade school survives in my mind. It's by Emily Dickinson and it says there is no frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing poetry. I don't know maybe only a really discontented child can become a seduced by books as I was maybe restlessness is the obvious corollary of devoted literacy. There was this big club chair in our living room and whenever I think back to my childhood, I'm in that club chair with my skinny scabby legs hanging over the edge and I'm reading a book and my mother standing in the doorway and she's always saying the same thing. She's saying go outside. She's saying it's a beautiful day. Even when the snow is falling or it's raining. She's saying all your friends are outside and the truth was they always were and sometimes I went out with them. I was coaxed out into the fields or the parks by The Lure of what I knew deep down inside even then was a normal childhood by the promise of being what I knew instinctively was a normal child who lived out there in the world and I did what she asked and what they asked but over and over again a base. It was never any good. There was always a part of me the best part of me back at home with in some book laid flat on the table the markets place. It's imaginary people all Frozen like the game of statues waiting for me to return and bring them back to life. For me as a child, that was where the real people were that was where the real trees Moved In The Wind that was where the real still dark Waters were in the years after those days in the club chair. I learned slowly but surely by meeting people in bookstores and at work and in libraries that I wasn't alone in this although I must say that at the time I was surely the only child I knew or my parents knew or any of my friends knew who preferred reading a book to playing Kick the Can In books, I travel not only to other worlds, although they were wonderful but in to myself I learned who I was and who I wanted to be what I might aspire to and what I might dare to dream about myself more powerfully, even than in the Ten Commandments. I learned in books a difference between good and evil between right and wrong but the whole time I felt that I was existing in a different dimension from everyone else there was waking time and there was sleeping time and then there were books a kind of a parallel universe in which anything might happen a parallel universe in which I might sometimes be a newcomer but I was never a stranger books were my real true World Books were always my perfect Island by the time I became an adult or at least a college student. I Is it warm my satisfaction in the sheer Act of Reading had intubated in the least and never has the world was often as hostile or at least somehow is blind to that Joy of reading as had been my girlfriend's banging on our screen door telling me to come outside because the truth is particularly in America that while we pay lip service to the virtues of reading. There's still something in our culture that suspect some people who read too much whatever reading too much might mean as lazy aimless streamers a country founded on the notion of being active of being out there suspect readers is people who need to grow up and come outside. Come outside. We're real life is and suspects readers as people who think themselves somehow Superior in their separateness. Now, there's some historical truth to that notion of superiority because reading has always been used historically as a way to divide a country or culture into the Literati and everyone else the intellectually worthy and the hoi polloi, but a man named Gutenberg blue that all to Smithereens in the 15th century because he invented the printing press and from then on the book went from a work of art for the very few into a source of information for many it became more difficult after that and it's the centuries went by for one small group of people to lay an exclusive claim to books to seize and hold reading as their own but it wasn't impossible and it continued to be done. Discovered it's an English major at Barnard College particularly by critics and Scholars because when I began to read their work, as a course requirement, I was disheartened to discover that many of them felt that the quality of pro etrian Pros were of novels and of history and biography had plummeted into some kind of intellectual bargain-basement in modern times. But reading saved me from despair as it always had for the more I read the more I realized that had always been that way and then apparently an essential part of being a literary critic whether and 1840 1930 or 1970 was concluding that there had once been a golden age of literature and it was over. I love this quote so much because it shows us that nothing changes the movies consume. So large a part of the Leisure of the country that little time is left for other things the trade magazine the of the industry Publishers Weekly ran that quote in 1923. Get the LIE is given to that by the fact that there are still so many of us who feel about bookstores and libraries the way some people feel about jewelry stores or car showrooms. I mean it still seems looking at my children learning to read realizing that what they're looking at really are incomprehensible scratches on paper. It still seems mysterious to me that there are some of us who have built not just a life but a self based largely on those little scratches and it is kind of a miracle to as well as a mystery. I mean the Sumerians first use the written word to make laundry list to keep track of their cows and their slaves and their household goods. But even in that primitive form the writing down of symbols at that moment was the beginning of something hugely and richly revolutionary when we think of it and don't take it for granted the notion that one person could have a thought even if that thought was about the size of his flocks and that that one thought could be retained. And accessed rethought really by another person in another time and place. I mean The French and the English modified gutenberg's press and then mechanized it to set down the books of the Bible and Martin Luther nailed his written Manifesto against the excesses of Catholicism to the door of a church in Wittenberg and the Declaration of Independence was set in type and Time After Time After Time, we had revolutions based on just words on the page and pretty soon Publishers had the means and the will to publish anything cookbooks government tracks broadsides newspapers novels poetry pornography and to publish them in a form that many people could afford and almost everybody could find at the library. Reading became the ultimate Democratic Act of the ultimate Democratic Nation making it possible for many of us to teach ourselves. What? To 200 or 300 years ago only the few had learned from tutors the president could quote Mark Twain because he'd read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the postman could understand the reference because he'd read it to the big lies of demagoguery over the years required much more stealth and cleverness because careful reading could reveal their flaws to ordinary people like you and me not for nothing did the Nazis burned books not for nothing were white folks in the South prohibited from teaching slaves to read. Books became the great purveyors truth and the truth shall set you free, but Freedom isn't all there is reading as a pathway to the world, but it's a world without any kind of geographic boundaries or even though steep risers of time. The eyewitnesses die, the written word can live on forever so that by the 50th anniversary of her death and bergen-belsen The Diary of Anne Frank had sold 20 million copies in 55 languages and while its validity as a holocaust document will be debated for years to come there is no doubt that for several generations of American children who had never heard of the death camp and perhaps never met a Jew the universality of Anne's adolescent experience and the horrible specificity of her imprisonment began to open a window on Prejudice. That might have stayed shut longer. I mean we read The Red Badge of Courage All Quiet on the Western Front The Naked and the dead and the great novels of War create Both patriots and pacifists among people like me who will never ever. See combat. I mean, how is it possible that a full two centuries after Jane Austen finished a manuscript and wrote to her sister Cassandra that she thought the story was altogether too light and bright that we come to Pride and Prejudice which has never been out of print as if to a new thing and we slide past customs and strictures and times and mores to arrive at a place that still educates amuses and enthralls us. It really is a miracle. I mean we read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming Our own Consciousness in someone else's mind Ebu. We wrote to completely analyze what we do when we read would almost be the Acme of a psychologist's achievements for it would be to describe very many of the most intricate workings of the human mind. People believe that all of this the book the book is endangered by technology. I don't believe that's so there's been so much talk as the age of the computer washed in a wave of cyber Surfers and modems that the United States would become a country at the end of the 20th century in which books would never leave the inside of the soul of that new machine so that the wave of the future was this the Age of Innocence online to be called up and read with a push of the view button The Fountainhead via the Internet maybe with all those tiresome objectivist political ethical speech is set in a different font for easy skipping over. Or even the outright deletion sedan Rands editor should have taken care of. Anyhow. I mean there would be no paper. There'd be no shelf space. You could have an entire Library when a couple of zip drives in a nice little box. I thought about that two years ago when I read an issue of the hornbook, which is the Journal of children's literature and it had a wonderful article by a writer and a librarian named Sara Ellis. She tried an experiment. She read on a laptop computer a book for children called the end of the rainbow, but it wasn't just any book for children. It was a book that exemplified the worst fears of those people who love literature about the rise of this new technology. The end of the rainbow was part of a series of Danish books about a little boy named Buster and the other books have been published by the fine Publishing House Dutton, but it's sales trajectory on the other books had taught it that the end of the rainbow would be a loss basically and so it had put the book on the internet free rather than go to the expense of publishing it in actual book form. Sara Ellis gave Buster on the computer a fair Shake, but the experience just didn't work for she concluded that the process of scrolling down reading in a linear fashion on a machine that she personally Associates with haste. We're all antithetical to reading for pleasure. Then she went to the library and took out an earlier bound Buster book and her reluctance disappeared. She wrote I experienced that feeling of surrender of putting myself in someone's hands which is one of the great pleasures of fiction a laptop is portable, but it's not companionable. Miss Ellis believe that her experience raised a lot of questions about the future of reading in this technological age, but reading her words, I found more questions answered than asked and one essential once settled to my satisfaction. Ten years ago, we in the newspaper business heard over and over that newspapers would shortly be supplanted by something within computers just the other day before the newspaper editors Gathering and Andy Grove. The president of Intel said that we had three years left. Well, I've heard that before books would just show up on the Internet. They would never be published at all. We've heard that over and over in the last decade and it hasn't happened. Those things online have not convincingly supplanted the more conventional product both those in the business books and those in the business of computer technology realize something that Miss Ellis Illustrated completely and that we readers I think always knew deep in our hearts that people are attached not only to what's inside of books but to the thing itself The old familiar form that started to take shape 400 years ago a laptop computer is a wondrous thing. It's inconceivable to me that anybody ever revises a novel without one. I mean select all delete is my friend. But no one wants to take a computer to bed at the end of a long day to read a chapter or two before dropping off to sleep. No one wants to take one out of their purse on the New York City subway to pass the time between 96th Street in the World Trade Center. No one wants to pass Heidi on disc down to her daughter on her eighth birthday. Never mind the question to take him one in to read in the bathroom. Or at least as far as I can see no one wants to do it yet. Even those people who are much farther along the Cyber curve than I am. The dis ease that Sara Ellis felt reading a book on the computer which she describes so eloquently is what so many of the rest of us feel and why the book continues to prosper Nest she wondered in her piece if children who had grown up with computers would feel differently than she did but I have three of those children and while they play games trade mail and do lots and lots of research on their computers. They do most of their reading in plain old ordinary books some that even belong to me years ago. They seem to like it that way. Before we get all bent out of shape about how change is coming and it's going to destroy the institutions that we loved. So well we ought to remember the Plato argued in the dialogues that if people learn to read and write poetry poetry would disappear because it was only in the oral tradition that poetry could be preserved properly. Well Plato was wrong. I love to say that and I believe those people are wrong who are predicting the imminent demise of the book particularly its death by microchip. I mean the discussion surrounding the issue always remind me of discussions from my 60s childhood about the gastronomic leap forward that was occasioned by the development of astronaut food. I mean we kept talking for years about soon you'd be able to eat an entire Sunday dinner in a pill. Well, it's 30 years since man first walked on the moon and when people sit down to a big old-fashioned Sunday supper, it's still a plate of roast beef and mashed potatoes not a capsule and a glass of water. That's because people like the thing itself, you don't just eat mashed potatoes because you need the nourishment you eat them because they're one of the five food groups and that's the way it is with books. It's not simply that we need information, but that we want to savor it carry it with us feel the heft of it move back and forth within it we like the thing itself the greatest threat to the essence of the book is not the computer. It's the sensors. It's us. I mean you look at the American Library Association Banned Book resource guide each year, and it's sad because it documents efforts all over the country to ban everything from Sinclair Lewis to Moby Dick Of Mice and Men Chaucer Catcher in the Rye. Judy Blume, I mean, I remember one day having a long and thoughtful provocative discussion about Robert Cornelius book The Chocolate War with my then 12 year old and then discovering the next day that had been yanked from the school library and the school near us at our house in the country somebody there on the school board thought that it was pornographic. I'm always interested in that word pornographic and the one obscene which has been at the heart of so many legal decisions about printed materials. I love this exchanged about the word obscene between Margaret Anderson who is a New York bookstore owner who tried to first published Ulysses in the United States and John Quinn who was a lawyer who represented her when she was prosecuted for doing that at the end of the proceedings which Miss Anderson lost Quinn turned to his client and said for god sakes don't publish any more obscene literature. And Anderson said how am I to know when it's obscene and her lawyer replied? I'm sure I don't know but don't do it. I repeated that to the 8th grade at the elementary school that my three kids attend which is not far from where that store was where Margaret Anderson wants tried to sell James Joyce's Masterpiece, which is now gone from being prosecuted to being elevated to number one on the MLA list of the top 100 books of the last hundred years the librarian at my kids school has an interesting approach to banned books week. She makes a lesson of banned books. Everybody has to read them. And the eldest students study the First Amendment with me the seventh and eighth graders, it's really cheering because they're all remarkably laissez-faire about censorship. I mean the consensus among them seems to be that everyone should be able to read anything but there was General agreement when we talked about it that a book that contains say a full frontal nude portrayal of the male form was completely inappropriate for kids and could in fact be considered obscene as soon as everybody agreed about that. I whipped out Maurice sendak's picture book in The Night Kitchen. Which portrays a small boy named Mickey floating nude penis and all through a landscape of enormous flour bags and milk bottles and the eighth grade all groaned. Gotcha. They knew I was saying but the utter rightness of Mickey's nudity had not been so easily accepted according to the American Library Association in a school in Missouri. Someone drew shorts on Mickey and elsewhere. The book was moved from low shelves to higher ones. So only taller older children could read it. This makes me sad because I love books so I remember one of the first columns I wrote when I was becoming an op-ed page columnist for the United States for the New York Times was about reading it was called enough bookshelves and it went like this. The voice I assume for children's bad behavior is like a winter coat dark and heavy. I put it on the other night when my eldest child appeared in the kitchen doorway an hour after he'd gone to bed. What are you doing down here? I began to say when he interrupted. I finished it the dominatrix tone went out the window and we settled down for an old-fashioned dish about the fine points of the Phantom Tollbooth. It is the wonderful tale of board and discontented boy named Milo and the journey he makes one day in his toy car with the humbug and the spelling bee and a slew of other Fantastical characters who changed his life. I read it first when I was 10. I still have the book report I wrote which began this is the best book ever. That was long before. I read the sound and the fury or little Dorrit the Lord Peter Wimsey Mysteries or Elmore Leonard. I was still pretty close to the mark all of us have similar hopes for our children good health happiness interesting and fulfilling work Financial stability, but like a model home that's different depending on who picks out the cabinets in the shutters the fine points often bury. Some people go nuts when their children learn to walk to throw a baseball to pick out the Moonlight Sonata on the piano the day I realized my eldest child could read was one of the happiest days of my life. When loses the capacity to grieve as a child Grieves or to rage as a child rages hotly despairingly with tears of passion the English novelist Anita Brookner rights and brief lot lives her newest book one grows up one become civilized one learns one man ones manners and consequently can no longer manage these two functions sorrow and anger adequately attempts to recapture that Primal spontaneity or doomed for the original reactions have been overlaid forgotten and yet we constantly reclaim some part of that Primal spontaneity through the youngest among us not only through their sorrow and anger but simply through everyday discoveries life unwrapped to see a child touch the piano keys for the first time to watch a small body slice through the surface of the water and a clean dive is to experience the shock not of the new but of the familiar Revisited as though it were straight. Engine wonderful reading has always been life unwrapped to me a way of understanding the world and understanding myself through both the unknown and the everyday if being a parent consists often a passing along chunks of ourselves to unwitting often unwilling recipients, then books are for me one of the simplest and most Surefire ways of doing that. I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves. That would give them an infinite number of worlds in which to wander and an entry to the real world to in the same way to strangers can settle down for a companion companionable Gap over baseball season's past and present. So it is often possible to connect with someone over a passion for books or the opposite. Of course, I once met a man who said he thought Warren piece was a big boring book when the truth was that it was only he who was big in boring. I remember making summer reading list for my sister of her coming home one day from work with my limp and yellowed paperback copy of Pride and Prejudice in her bag and saying irritably look tell me if she marries. Mr. Darcy because she if she doesn't I'm not going to finish the book. And the feeling of getting this I felt as I piously said that I would never reveal an ending wall somewhere inside. I was shouting. Yes. Yes, she will marry. Mr. Darcy over and over again as often as you'd like you had only to see this boy's face when he said I finished it to know that something and made an indelible Mark upon him. I walked him back upstairs with a fresh book my copy of A Wrinkle in Time Madeline lungless Unforgettable story of children who travel through time and space to save their father from the forces of evil. Now when I leave the room, he is reading by the pinpoint of his little reading light the ship of his mind moving through high seas with the help of my compass just before I close the door. I catch a glimpse of the making of myself and the making of his sharing some of the same Timber and I am a happy woman. Yep, I believe in Reading. I love reading I believe in pretty much untrammeled reading when I think of my children. I think of this quote from Holbrook Jackson fear of corrupting the mind of the younger generation is the lofty has form of cowardice. I gave my eldest son portnoy's complaint when he was 13, not only because he's a serious reader, but because I didn't want him to think that he was the only person in the world who was on Terminal testosterone. Overload. I myself learned most of what I knew about sex from Mary McCarthy said group when I was for 13 years old myself. In fact, if you take down my paperback copy from the Shelf, it's still opens effortlessly to the scene in which Dottie loses her virginity. Well as an old married mother of three I can tell you that it didn't hurt me a wit. In fact, I like to believe that the seditious view in that book of the pinched and narrow lives of educated women set me up to become both a feminist and a columnist two things. I've been very pleased to be. In fact reading made me what I am today. There are only two ways really to become a writer one is to actually write the other is to read here's how Dickens friend and his first biographer John Forester describes him as a boy. He was never a first-rate hand at marbles or Peg top or prisoners base, but he had great pleasure at watching the other boys at those games reading while they played. I don't know what that boy read as he watched those others long-dead long dust play the games. He couldn't Master while he sat there quietly reading his way toward immortality, but I bet it wasn't Xperia show me a writer who says she was inspired to try by A Great Master and I'll show you someone who's remembering it the way they think it ought to be remembered. It's too daunting to read middlemarch and say even to yourself. Oh I can do this. I found it pleasing that Kafka cut his storytelling teeth on Sherlock Holmes when he was a kid all the thinking about kafka's a kid really turned my mind around and Faulkner's biographer Joseph Blattner writes that young Billy's taste is a boy were pretty low brow. He subscribe to a magazine called the American boy. He poured over it every month over articles about famous men sentimental short stories departments such as the boy debater and the boy coin collector so was born the sound and the Fury from rip Roars about How the West Was Won. In fact, I think one of the most pernicious phenomenon in assigned reading and if any of you teachers are out there, I hope you'll listen to me on this one is the force-feeding of serious work in an age when the reader feels pushed away not from the particular book being a sign but from a whole class of books and maybe from Reading itself. So it seems to me that the assigning of Silas Marner to High School freshman is unlikely to make them enthusiastic about reading the Masterwork mental March. I mean at age 13 David Copperfield doesn't seem like an invitation to Bleak House. It seems like an invitation to Cliff Notes. If any of you like me or determined to raise children with a strong attachment to Dickens. I recommend Reading A Christmas Carol lab during the holidays. I mean, maybe there are former children who learn to love books by reading Moby Dick, but that sounds apocryphal to me. Little Women now that could do it Melville could certainly never have made me a writer but other books did the Betsy tacy stories. And of Green Gables A Wrinkle in Time The Phantom Tollbooth and later on I recall so vividly one day in college skipping my seminar on writers of the Renaissance because I was within 20 pages of finishing DH Lawrence's sons and lovers and I was so swept up by the passion that it disappointed woman feels for her son's and I knew reading it that I would never ever write as well as that but I kept thinking that if anything even dimly like that power to move to and thrall to light up the darkness was somehow hidden in what was then the manual Royal typewriter on my dorm room desk that I had to make a go of it. I remember thinking why would anybody want to be the president of the United States or of General Motors? If they could be D H Lawrence instead? I mean, maybe it's true that base we readers are dissatisfied people. To be elsewhere to live vicariously through words in a way. We can't live directly through life. Maybe we're the world's great Nomads. If only in our mind as you can see tonight, I travel today in a way that I'm once only dreamed of as a child and the irony is that I don't really like it very much. I'm the sort of person who prefers to stay at home surrounded by Family by Friends by familiarity by books. This is the one thing I really like about traveling the time on airplanes spent reading with no ringing phone solitary and happy it turns out when I think about it that when my younger self thought of taking wing, it was really only a spirit she wanted to let sore And now I know that books are the plane and the train and the road there the destination and there the journey for me their home. Thank you very much. (00:40:51) Author Anna quindlen speaking at the library Foundation of Hennepin County's pen pals author lecture series over the noon hour will have the question and answer session that followed her speech. By the way. We should note that Anna quindlen is going back to work as a columnist. Once again, she worked for a long time for the New York Times. Well now she's going to be writing a column for Newsweek magazine get a reminder more from Anna quindlen over the noon hour and also a reminder that we have a special offer for you this being our end of the fiscal year Pledge Drive our chance our opportunity our hope to balance the books here as a special added inducement to try to get you to call make a membership pledge or renew your membership. We're offering at the $10 per month level how reading changed my life copy of Anna quinlan's book. Petty Rudolph is here and Patty re big big big goal here by noon. We've got a long way to go. We we do We'd need 64 more members to make our goal for this hour to people online right now and you can be one of them at one eight hundred two to seven 28:11 as we've been talking about today. We have a giveaway very nice little iMac computer from First Tech computer and Uptown now, you don't have to become a member to qualify to register for this but it would be very nice. If you did you don't have to pledge to enter but this iMac is I'm not I'm not a real computer geek. Okay, but it looks like I could handle this because you don't need a thick manual this thing. You just plug it in way it goes. Yeah, that's my kind of computer. And if you call now and make a pledge or even don't make a pledge you can be registered into this drawing for this iMac computer and we'll be holding the drawing tomorrow between 3:00 and 4:00 p.m. And that's just one of many things that we have 1-800 to to 7. 11 is the number to call we got five callers on the line right now. And once again to stay on track what happened? Here's here's kind of the background on this, you know, every year we determine how many members we need how much in terms of membership contributions. We need to balance the books and during the course of the year. We managed to Pare down substantially the number of pledge days and everything was going swimmingly until this weekend and then things didn't go as well as we had hoped they would over the weekend and now we find ourselves a little bit behind we've only got three days left in the in the fiscal year today tomorrow and Wednesday. And what we're hoping to do here is to get all of you listening who have not yet become members or you know, it's time to renew or you want to make an additional contribution. Give us a call here get us back on track to stay on track. We should sign up 63 people by 12 o'clock today. And so Your part only about seven minutes left if that 1-800 to to 728 11 is the number to call if you join at the $10 per month level will be glad to send out a copy of Anna quinlan's new book how reading changed my life as a special premium Patty Ray mentioned everybody who calls in whether you pledge or not. You'll be automatically entered in the drawing for the iMac third generation computer third generation of iMac. So give us a call 1-800 to to 728 11 do so quickly though six minutes to go 14 callers on the line and 6262 people is what we need to hear from any rate do this we can do this because there are three ways to pay. Well, of course credit card your plastic a check and the new easy pay plan that we have which is our affordable direct monthly payment program you pay with your credit card and you know, we can make it as easy for you as any of your other bills that you pit send out every month. We need you to call though or sign up online. 9 @ MP r dot o-- r-- g-- but do it now at one eight hundred two to seven 28:11. Yep, MPR and midday is your constant companion. Then you really should call now to keep those coming your way 21 callers on the line. We've got about oh five and a half minutes left to go 22 callers and we can take 50 callers at a time here. Would you like a copy of an equivalence book how reading changed my life? Well that's available as a special premium at the $10 per month level if you're already a member and it's you're all paid up and everything and you want to copy of the book and you want to help out here into the fiscal year of pledge Drive additional contribution of $75 will get you in the door. Everybody who calls is automatically entered in the drawing for the iMac computer from First Tech computer in uptown. So do give us a call at specially those of you who are regular listeners to the midday program low always love to hear from you know, Patty read that it would be nice I suppose. We didn't have to do these pledge drives but we do what we do in the nice thing about them is that it gives us an opportunity to make that connection with the listeners and we keep talking day after day here and it kind of goes out and occasionally you get the letter the phone call. Usually somebody back somebody mad about something as a role. The nice thing about these pledge drives is that you get a sense of who's listening and when they're listening and you know, whether they tell us whether they like the programs and so on so take advantage of this opportunity 1-800 to to 728 11 a reminder this year. This hours Habitat for Humanity sponsor is the huge a Anderson Foundation a proud partner with Anderson Corporation and supporting MPR and Habitat for Humanity. What's that all about tell me gear? Okay, you do it. So well, here's the deal. There's a partnership that's been put together of Corporations and Foundations MPR has joined with these folks and What's happening here is kind of a parallel deal going on like for insertion now for each membership that that we take in during this abbreviated Drive. The partnership will send $10 off to Habitat for Humanity. The idea here is that if we meet our end of the year goal will actually be able to build a house a house. That would be cool for somebody building something something tangible. Something. Good doesn't come out of your membership money or anything like that. It's just another another way to contribute to your community, and we hope you take advantage of it 1-800 to to 7 2011 20 callers on the line ready have 62 members yet to go here if we're going to make our goal by noon. We have three minutes to go Patty Ray. We make it so easy for you to do this with them, you know when you call in at 1 800 2 to 7 2011 won't take very much your time, and we don't have much time left. So if you call now at QT 7 2011 three ways to pay credit card check or the easy pay plan where you have the direct monthly payment. You don't have to mess with it. It's there, you know, you've done a good thing but it starts with you by picking up the telephone at one eight hundred two to seven twenty eight eleven or pledge online at npr.org very good. So you're here. You're a lot smarter about this. So whole computer business than you let on what makes you say that just because just because I know that that if you if you get on the net there at npr.org you can take a look at all the nice premiums. We have you can find out more about are three ways to pay and everything else that goes on during pledge week, but you've got to do it right now because we're running out of time. We've only got about two minutes left to go 26 people online, but we have 59 more people we need right our goal this hour so call now at 1-800-273-8255 ssible for your radio listening be responsible because You listen to midday. Come on. Midday listeners 28 callers on the line. We got room for at least twenty two more of you. It only take about two minutes and you'll have done your part. Would you like a copy of an equivalence how reading changed my life? It's not only a great little book about why she loves reading but it's got great lists of yeah of not her favorite book so much is kind of recommended books and these are not weird books. I've even heard of many of these 1-800 to to 728 11 is the number to call a minute ago. Have you signed up yet or is it time to renew then? We need to hear from you for an additional $75. You can get that book how reading changed my life. I Anna quindlen and that is our premium at the 120 dollar level, but it has to start with you by picking up the phone now at 1 800 to G7 28:11. If MPR satisfies your needs be they for reading for listening to everything we have on midday the speeches the Then you should call now and 1-800 QT 7 2011 our pledge online at npr.org if you've never joined before right now, this minute is your chance to make your membership count. If it's time to renew don't pass up the opportunity. Give us a call here. Our volunteers are going to be standing by Long Way to the final goal, but you can help us get there 1-800 to to 728 11.