Gordon’s picnic is a snapshot of the Fayerlees and Meriwether’s Southern family reunion. It’s an August tradition for more than one hundred folks from all over the South and elsewhere. It’s not a happy day. As revealed by Sally Maury, who was...
Norton recalls Edith Wharton “had a passion for picnics, a passion not shared by quite all of her guests, some of whom, unskilled at balancing a loaded plate on their knees, would have secretly preferred a hot square meal served on solid mahogany: but they dared not...
Vian’s L’Écume des jours is variously translated as The Foam of Days, The Scum of Days, or Froth on the Daydream. Take your pick. It was filmed by Charles Belmont as Spray of Days (1968) and retold as an opera by Edison Denisov (1986). It was without a picnic until...
Imagine a noir picnic at which you tell your hosts a shark-feeding-frenzy story. That’s Orson Welles’ idea of dark times in The Lady from Shanghai. Imagine, too, that the story told by Michael O’Hara is intended as an allusion to his host and...
A picnic in the park is a perfect situation for accommodating a would-be lover. Suspicious that her footman Richard is not what he pretends to be, Judy allows him to picnic with him on the Serpentine in Hyde Park. The conversation is rapid-fire and full of innuendo...
![Laurent de Brunhoff’s Babar’s Picnic [Pique-nique Chez Babar] (1949)](https://picnicwit.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Laurent-de-Brunhoff.-Babars-Picnic-1949-1080x675.jpg)
Why De Brunhoff allowed this title Babar’s Picnic is a muddle. It’s not about Babar’s picnic! It’s about the young elephants’ picnic and their adventures. Importantly, the story’s portrayal of African Blacks and Native Americans was...
Ford’s jokey picnic episode is among the best. It plays counter to expectations because the picnic never happens. The situation is built around a conflict of rivals at an Army cavalry outpost in the 1870s. Miss Olivia Dandridge is flirting with Lt. Pennell and...
Toklas suggests that chopped roast beef and chopped chicken with mushrooms make the best picnic sandwiches. When these were not enough, Toklas and her partner Gertrude Stein stopped at restaurants where they might dine on Morvan Ham with Cream Sauce, three-minute veal...
When Auden was twenty-four and just starting as a poet, he placed himself on the lower slope of Mount Parnassus, sacred to Apollo and the Muses of the arts, where he might find his place at a “picnic on the lower slopes” with minor poets. Thirty-plus years later,...
Lewis’s food memoir includes happy memory of a Revival Sunday Dinner, aka “Second Sunday,” in her hometown of Freetown, Virginia, in the 1930s. Cooking was done by women, while the men attended church but returned home to pack the family and the food so that it would...
