The yellow basket and the yellow summer hat in They Arrived in Pittsburgh suggest that there will be a picnic. The grimy factory stacks spewing smoke suggest otherwise. The basket and hat symbolize the hope that in Pittsburgh (or any other industrial city), the...
On a fantastic day in 1941, Wolcott photographed picnickers on the Sarasota beach. She was working for the Farm Services Administration, documenting contemporary American life. Among her subjects was picnicking, which she found in serval guises on the beach and...
LeRoy’s Random Harvest picnic is phony. (It’s also original to the screenplay.) Smithy and Paula sit on fake grass beside an artificial stream with real goldfish. It’s props like these Nathaniel West had pulverized in his Hollywood satire The Day of...
Buried in Gastronomical Me and the story Fisher’s first oyster is her memory of a joyous school picnic at the Huntington School for Girls. Fisher remembers t “Hungry shrieking,” girls “at half past noon a procession of house-boys would come...
Some of us forget that Enid Blyton is among the top ten best-selling fiction authors of all time. Many, however, remember the phrase “lashings of ginger beer,” associated with her picnics that seems to exist in her Famous Five novels. The Famous Five drink...
Succumbing to ethnic paranoia and anger, the United States Congress authorized President Franklin Roosevelt to intern Japanese Americans whether they were U.S. citizens or not. The law was signed in February. In May 1942, Lee documented some of the...
McCarthy and Wilson enjoyed sex and picnics in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. They often picnicked at the freshwater ponds dotting the mid-Cape, but during the summer of 1942, their marriage was wobbly. Wilson was fond of remembering his sexual relations with McCarthy....
Momentary serenity and happiness are upended in Welty’s “Asphodel,” a humorous picnic story in which three old maids are frightened by the appearance of a naked man. Cora, Irene, and Phoebe plan a picnic at Asphodel, the former home of their recently...
Birger Ljundqvist’s Siesta Hartsena is a portrait of the artist taking a break. It has the simple appearance of a pleasant summer scene on a bluff above the sea. On the other hand, it may be more complex if the two women are the same in a different guise, one nude and...
The box social auction, aka picnic basket auction, is Rodgers and Hammerstein II’s original to their production of Oklahoma! It’s a substitute for lovers’ combat. Instead of knights in armor, the good-hearted cowboy Curley and black-hearted farmhand...
