In “Picnics and Outdoor Meals,” Spry writes, “The nicest outdoor meals are those cooked on the spot,” and among the best are barbecues.” She does not like “grand picnics,” the kind for which everything is transported and served by staff. “This is not the best way to...
Shahn’s Sunday School Picnic, Ponderosa Homesteads, North Carolina (1937); http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/fsa.8a17327/ For a contrast, see The Bad Seed.
![Lee Miller’s Picnic [Ile Sainte-Marguerite] (1937)](https://picnicwit.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Lee-Miller.-Picnic-Ile-Sainte-Marguerite-1937--700x675.jpg)
Miller’s Picnic (1937) is a photograph lovers’s gossip. At the time, Miller seemed to think of it as just another snapshot, but it’s now among her best sellers. In the summer of 1937, Miller and Roland Penrose, her lover, lived in Mougins, a village above Cannes near...
Sherwood King’s If I Die Before I Wake does not have a picnic episode. Orson Welles, however, invents one for The Lady from Shanghai, It’s a powerful unpicnicky story told by Michael O’Hara, the protagonist, about a shark frenzy and its awful...
Perhaps it’s gossip, but according to Robert Lewis Taylor, Fields crammed his Lincoln or Cadillac, he was a collector, with hampers of watercress, chopped olives and nuts, tongue, peanut butter, and strawberry preserves, deviled eggs, and spiced ham sandwiches,...
In 1938, Andre Breton and Jacqueline Lambda visited Trotsky, who was living in exile in Mexico City. Also present but not in the photos was Trotsky’s wife Natalia Sedova and Freda Kahlo. When not picnicking, Trotsky worked with Rivera, Breton, and Lambda to...
Exiled in Mexico City, Trotsky and his wife, Natalia, loved to picnic. It was one means of enjoying a sense of freedom, though he was guarded even them. James T. Farrell writes, “At the picnic, Trotsky and Natalia went off to walk in the woods in opposite directions....
Persephone’s abduction by Hades, sometimes Pluto, is rife with sexual predation and seasonal change. In Theogony, Hesiod says that while gathering asphodels with the daughters of Oceanus, Persephone is abducted and taken to Hades, where she rules as the Iron Queen....
Blixen’s Out of Africa is a memoir without picnics. But Sidney Pollack and his screenwriter Kurt Luedke have added two picnic episodes that reveal Blixen’s characteristic vanity and romantic nature. See Isak Dinesen [Karen Blixen]. Out of Africa (New York:...
At first, Donald Duck’s beach picnic is a pleasant outing. Donald and Pluto set up on the beach for a perfect day. Donald plants an umbrella for shade and spreads a blanket for food. Expectations are high. It doesn’t last, as usual. The picnic turmoil is classic....
