McRae and Davis: What a Great Show -- David Crisp, Billings Blog

We drove down on Saturday (Aug. 2) to see Wally McRae and Stephanie Davis perform in a fund-raiser for the Northern Plains Resource Council. What a great show.

I had never seen Davis perform -- only heard her on "A Prairie Home Companion" -- a show on which she has appeared, she said in response to a question, "thousands of times." I had seen McRae once, also on "A Prairie Home Companion," when it originated from the Alberta Bair Theater a few years ago.

They were both great, and the way they played off each other was even better. McRae, in particular, is quite a performer, reciting his poems and reading some of his new prose with great emotion and skill. Every funny thing he does is a bit sad, and every sad one is a bit funny, that cowboy mixture of romance, sentimentality, toughness and fatalism that we've all gotten to know so well.

He also told a follow-up to the following story:

At one point Wallace McRae was clinically dead. But the doctors brought him back, and he was lying in a hospital bed hooked up to a respirator, a tube down his throat, unable to move, unable to talk, when in came Paul Zarzyski, a fellow Montana cowboy poet.

He had come to tell Wally that he couldn’t die. If he died Paul would never want to perform his own poetry again, either on stage with Wally or seeing Wally in the audience looking at Paul with a critical eye.

Later, on his feet again, Wally joked with Paul, “Boy, was I ever tempted to die, and relieve the world of having to listen to your poems.”

After McRae told Zarzyski that he had some stories he wanted to tell that he couldn't fit into rhyme and meter, Zarzyski told him to write prose.

"I don't know anything about writing prose," McRae protested.

"You don't know anything about writing poetry either," Zarzyski said, "but that's never stopped you."

Funny that you can go to the Alberta Bair Theater all season and see great performers from around the world. But none of them top a pair who grew up in Bridger and Colstrip. This is blessed country.