Slightly drunk, Sebastian Flyte looks up at the sky, remarking (mainly to himself), “Just the place to bury a crock of gold,” he says, “I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then when I was old and ugly and miserable, I...
At the start of their picnic, Anthony Edwardes asks Constance Petersen about sandwiches. “Ham or liverwurst,” he asks. “Liverwurst,” Petersen silently replies with a knowing smile. Because Hitchcock cut the actual picnic from Spellbound, some...
Alajálov commemorated the final year of World War II for The New Yorker (1945) magazine illustrating a coach of a passenger train filled with exhausted, sleeping soldiers and sailors, rumbling on in the dark, while a staid couple eats a picnic meal. The blasé couple...
Rodgers and Hammerstein II’s joyous clambake is among the significant changes to Ferenc Molnár’s bleak Liliom. It’s a setup for the unhappiness that follows when Billy Bigelow botches a robbery and dies, leaving his beloved Julie Jordan pregnant and alone....
Jones’s Church Supper suggests the celebration of an African American picnic supper, sometimes called Dinner on the Grounds. An event like this is held in summer, usually on the first Sunday in August. It was always, and still is, a revival meeting. And while...
Astrid Lindgren’s zany picnic is a gastronomical feast. The chief picnicker is Pippi Longstocking, a brash, energetic, good-natured Swedish girl of nine who lives independently packs her own picnic. After zipping through some household chores, Pippi takes her...
Bowen’s often quoted “it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden” is a metaphor, usually taken out of context: “No, it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that, it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden. One kind of power to...
Bradbury’s “The Million Year Picnic” is a sad metaphor about what a picnic is not—a family’s escape from Earth to build a new Eden on Mars. We don’t know how it ends because this is the final story in the collection of The Martian...
Nolan’s fantasy is that Australia’s most renowned bushranger Ned Kelly enjoyed a bush picnic. His source is probably J. J. Keneally’s sympathetic biography The Complete Inner History of the Kelly Gang (1929), based on which Nolan made two series...
Christie’s picnic at Kawkab in Syria was indelible because the dessert was in bloom. During an archeological dig in 1934 (?), Christie and Max Mallowan* packed a lorry named Queen Mary for sightseeing at Kawkab, a hill about 300 meters high. They expected an...
Albert’s Le repos des chasseurs, aka Hunters’ Rest is a scaled down version of the Halt on the Hunt. The simple menu is bread ,fruit, and wine.
Charles Addams. “Goodness, Murray, it wouldn’t be a picnic without ants.” The New Yorker (June 11, 1949)
Leiris’s autobiographical exposé of trying to make sense of his emerging Manhood includes an episode of when he got his first erection at a family picnic in a Paris park. He was six or seven years old, and at the time, he recalls, he “established no direct relation...
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...
Cadmus’s What I Believe (1947-1948) is a beach picnic without food, inspired by E.M. Forester’s essay of the same-named. Forster is the dark man reading a book with the red cover in the lower left foreground. The figures are based on some of Cadmus’ friends and former...
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...
Rogers, a nineteen-year-old Private first-class soldier, met Stein and Toklas in 19717 Nimes while on furlough. Working with an ambulance unit attached to the French army, the U.S. had not yet entered the war. Rogers followed Stein and Toklas into the Hotel de...
