James Ivory’s Jefferson in Paris,/em> (1995)

James Ivory’s Jefferson in Paris,/em> (1995)

Ivory and Jhabvala imagine a “typical” gala Parisian garden party circa 1784. It was hosted by the Marquis de Lafayette for Thomas, then acting as American ambassador. Though de Lafayette was philosophically democratic, he was required to cultivate relationships with...
Barbara Banks’s’ “A Tibetan Picnic” (1996)

Barbara Banks’s’ “A Tibetan Picnic” (1996)

In a pasture at 16,000 feet high, surrounded by the Himalayan peaks, Bank’s stopped for a picnic on the road to Lhasa. The campsite is chosen not by hunger but by availability. It was level enough for a camp. Their motorcar is unpacked, a fire lighted, and tea...
Jacqueline Woodson’s We Had a Picnic Sunday Past (1997)

Jacqueline Woodson’s We Had a Picnic Sunday Past (1997)

Woodson’s We Had a Picnic This Sunday Past (1997) is a joyous family gathering with mounds to eat. It’s a story about an African American family reunion picnic in an urban park. The narrator, a young girl, comes with her Grandma, who has worked frying...
Mario Vargas Ilosa’s The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (1998)

Mario Vargas Ilosa’s The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (1998)

Vargas Llosa imagines Lima as a city of extremes. It’s beautiful if you “concentrate on the landscape and the birds, but it’s “ugly if you notice the piles of garbage festering as it “piles up on the outer edge of the Malecón and spills...
Charles Coe’s Picnic on the Moon (1999)

Charles Coe’s Picnic on the Moon (1999)

Charles Coe’s poem “Picnic on the Moon,” Picnic on the Moon (1999), is not sci-fi. It’s a critique of human violence and enmity on Earth set against the Moon’s tranquility and quiet. The Moon sounds like the perfect picnic spot- a great place to bask...
Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind (2002)

Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind (2002)

It’s unknown if Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash ever picnicked. His biographer Sylvia Nasar doesn’t mention any. Undeterred by the lack of biographical information,  Ron Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldman invented a picnic to add narrative...
Thomas Dworzak’s

Thomas Dworzak’s (2002)

Dworzak’s picnic in Grozny, Chechnya, is disconcerting. Chechen men having a picnic in a bombed-out neighborhood near Minutka Square. See Thomas Dworzak’s Ruins of Chechnya (2002). Magnum Photos. Compare this George Allen Warner’s  picnic in The Rubbish Dump (1955)...
Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003)

Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003)

Ali’s family picnic is outwardly happy but inwardly troubled. After twenty years, Nazneen’s marriage to Chanu Ahmed has gone wobbly. She’s never loved Chanu, but at the time of the picnic, she’s conflicted by guilt and lust-fueled by Karim, a Muslim political activist...
Nigel Slater’s Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunget (2004)

Nigel Slater’s Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunget (2004)

Slater’s picnic in the family backyard is a metaphor for his homosexuality and his conflicted relationship with his father, who wants him to be masculine. Tinned Ham” is humorous up to a point, but the picnic menu can make you gag. Slater describes a...
Charles Dance’s Ladies in Lavender (2004)

Charles Dance’s Ladies in Lavender (2004)

Locke’s story “Ladies in Lavender” does not have a picnic. Dance thought better and wrote a beach picnic on the coast of Cornwall into his screenplay. The story is simple. Ursula and Janet, spinster sisters, well on in years, live in a cottage by the sea near the...