“Heroic Survivors of the Picnic.” is Gwen Raverat’s bittersweet memory of a miserable picnic. It’s the next-to-last anecdote in her memoir Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood. I think she means to suggest that life was no picnic but that she...
Dodge’s To Catch a Thief does not have a picnic episode. See David Dodge. To Catch a Thief. New York: Random House, 1952; Alfred Hitchcock. To Catch a Thief (1955). The screenplay by John Michael Hayes is based on David Dodge’s novel (1952), Hilary Radner. “To Catch a...
Frederick Ashton’s Picnic at Tintagel is inspired by Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s popular Victorian novel Royal Mount, where sightseers picnic on Tintagel Castle’s ruins. (Discussion of Braddon’s Royal Mount is posted elsewhere on PicnicWit.com)...
Vanderbilt doesn’t care whether you cook out at a picnic or bring everything along. What does matter is to picnic in temperate weather and a style. Her recommendations in the Complete Book of Etiquette are tried and true cold fried chicken, little cold veal or...
When Hal Carter tells Madge Owens, “We’re not goin’ on no goddamn picnic,” he means they are “goin'” to make love instead. Madge is willing. They are so passionate, their lust so potent, audiences never notice that when the curtain...
Beckett’s setting for Waiting for Godot (En antendant Godot) is an empty stage and a tree without leaves. It’s an unlikely place for an unhappy picnic. The picnic begins when Pozzo and Lucky arrive. Pozzo brandishes a whip and holds Lucky at the end of a...
Bowles and Schuyler’s performance piece A Picnic Cantata: for Four Women’s Voices, Two Pianos, and Percussion (1954) is delightfully silly. It’s about a happy picnic that is intentionally nonsensical. The music by Bowles’ and the libretto by...
It’s a tender moment when Helen Shaw and Joel Aaron climb a hill to picnic and enjoy the view. They do not bring food or picnic gear but sit on the rock facing the sun. They are good friends, not lovers, and Aaron soon will be leaving Joel for Israel. Helen...
Bissell’s 7 ½ Cents is a light-hearted comedy about a garment factory in a small town in Iowa. Junction City is a shock to Sid Sorokin, the new superintendent of the Sleep Tite Pajama Company, because he used to be Chicago. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, he...
The horror of LeRoy’s The Bad Seed is serial killer Rhoda Penmark, a darling little girl with blond pigtails and blue eyes who murders a classmate at a school picnic because she covets his penmanship medal (pun intended). The picnic food is present but...
