Laurie Colwin’s Picnics (1988 & 1993)

Laurie Colwin’s Picnics (1988 & 1993)

Family Happiness is Laurie Colwin’s comic tale about an Eastside Manhattan Jewish housewife, finds who finds happiness at home and on a picnic in bed with her lover. On the way to her first affair, Polly Demarest stops for a smoked salmon sandwich. Alone and...
Randal Kleiser’s Big Top Pee-Wee  (1988)

Randal Kleiser’s Big Top Pee-Wee (1988)

Among the silly escapades in Big Top Pee-wee is Pee-Wee’s klutzy relationship with his financé Winnie Johnson. Every day, Pee-wee and Winnie meet for a lunchtime picnic, for which she makes egg salad sandwiches that Pee-wee hates.   Pee-wee endures this because...
E.L. Doctorow’s  Billy Bathgate (1989)

E.L. Doctorow’s Billy Bathgate (1989)

A picnic in the woods is a novelty for Billy Bathgate, a fifteen-year-old New York City boy who has never walked on anything but pavement. So, when Drew Preston, a worldly woman of twenty-one, says,” Let’s go for a picnic….” Billy is flummoxed. He...
Oscar Hijuelos’s Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989)

Oscar Hijuelos’s Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989)

Oscar Hijuelos’s Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989) is about Cuban immigrants in the 1950s. Music and food sometimes blend, and at a hotel club, there are platters of roast suckling pig, rice and beans, and a chocolate-éclair cake drenched in honey. But for a...
Jeff Wall’s Vampires’ Picnic (1991)

Jeff Wall’s Vampires’ Picnic (1991)

At first glance, it’s a group posing for a photograph, but scrutiny reveals a group of vampires actively pursuing what they do best. Then you realize that Jeff Wall’s photograph Vampires’ Picnic (1991) is political satire, an allusion to Karl...
Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams  (1990)

Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams (1990)

Animal Dreams describes a celebration of All Souls’ Day in Grace, Arizona. The cemetery is on a hill above the town. Once there, the graves are cleaned and decorated, after which the family enjoys a picnic. The protagonist Codi says, “We were a harvester-ant clan...
Stephen Speilberg’s Jurassic Park: The Lost World (1990)

Stephen Speilberg’s Jurassic Park: The Lost World (1990)

Isla Sorna is a dangerous place to picnic. Traveling by Range Rover over Costa Rica’s bumpy roads to a deserted beach, the Bowman family for adventure and picnicking on the beach. When they get there, they are alone. Ellen Bowman is afraid of snakes. Young Cathy...
Lucy Raverat’s The Picnic and Others (1986-1990c.)

Lucy Raverat’s The Picnic and Others (1986-1990c.)

Lucy Rawlinson, the granddaughter of Gwen Raverat, paints under the name Lucy Raverat. A series of three picnic-themed picnic paintings is a metaphor for the state of her mind, evolving from troubled and uncertain o hopeful. In 1986, The Picnic suggest trouble...