Whether or not Barry and the Llewellyn Davis family picnicked in Kensington Park (or any park) is moot. Assuming they did, Forster’s Finding Neverland, with a screenplay by David Magee, fictionalizes three picnics that mark significant moments in Barrie’s...
Sideways is a slice of life in Miles Raymond’s midlife crisis. Rex Pickett’s novel and Payne’s film fail to distinguish whether Miles is a sad sack or a creep. Though there aren’t any picnics in Rex Pickett’s novel, Payne invented three...
Positive and joyous associations are prized by manufacturers. Cadbury’s Picnic Bar is a candy made with wafers, caramel, peanuts, and rice crisps, all covered in milk chocolate. Because it is lumpy, advertising wags dubbed it “Deliciously Ugly.” It’s a UK...
Locke’s story “Ladies in Lavender” does not have a picnic. Dance thought better and wrote a beach picnic on the coast of Cornwall into his screenplay. The story is simple. Ursula and Janet, spinster sisters, well on in years, live in a cottage by the sea near the...
Martin’s advice (always with humor) for picnics is the chapter for “Outdoor Eating.” Here it is: It is true that some rules for eating outdoors are different from those that apply indoors. For example, it is permissible to execute extraneous wildlife found crawling...
Banville’s The Sea is about a man’s untrustworthy memories—less about his dying wife and more about his sexual awakening when he was about eleven years old. Looking back, Max Morden realizes that his observations of the Grace family’s beach picnics...
Kelly’s childhood experience while attending a family picnics on Sunday afternoons embarrassed him because he thought picnics were “uncool.” The result years after is Shit Picnic (2005), a sad picnic in which there is a vacant white blanket in a...
The Madhur Jaffrey and Family at a Picnic (1940c.). Jaffrey is third from left in the front row. Madhur Jaffrey’s Climbing the Mango Trees, a Memoir (2005) describes her family’s picnic in Delhi in the 1940s before independence and partition. Jaffrey says...
Banksy’s satirical Picnic contrasts a group of indigenous African hunter-gatherers bewildered by the Picnic of a White middle-class urban family picnicking on the beach. The contrast between civilizations and technologies suggests irreconcilable differences...
Siskiyou Mountain Tea Party suggests a primordial picnic of three naked women, each holding an infant, picnicking on a mountain ledge. Kurland seems to suggest picnics are a timeless moment of leisure. Featured Image: Justine Kurland’s Siskiyou Mountain Tea...
Coppola’s picnic in Marie Antoinette is a halt on the hunt. Usually, these meetings are informal, as recommended by Brillat Savarin in The Psychology of Taste. They are inspired by paintings of Jean-Antoine Watteau, Nicolas Lancret, Charles Van Loo, and others....
Bridgland’s Forward, Conquer! We Have a Car and Can Picnic in the Country! Is part fun and part satire. Yet, whether Bridgland knows it or not, no other mode of transportation has boosted picnicking and helped make them ubiquitous. See Adam Bridgland. Forward,...
It is uncertain if Ackrill’s Picnic is a spinoff of pin-up art, soft porn, or sly humor. Whatever it means to be, it’s not the kind of picnic that meets traditional expectations. This picnic is a life-sized woman holding a skull and a walking staff. This allusion...
Gahan Wilson’s humor is a marvel. Any attempt to explain Picnic Reception robs it of its satiric sting. (Pardon the pun.) Featured Image: Gahan Wilson. “Picnic Reception, “The New Yorker (July 31, 2006)
According to Stephen Frears, the Balmoral picnic is a glum episode as the Queen and family deal with the grief and notoriety resulting from the death of Princess Diana. Having retreated to Balmoral, a glum royal family tries to find solace outdoors. When the Queen...
Davis’s Prometheus Bound, Prometheus Unbound, is a picnic enigma based on the Greek myth of Prometheus. The best-known versions of which are Hesiod’s Theogony (700 BCE) and Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, Prometheus Unbound, and Prometheus Fire-Bringer (415 c. BCE). None...
Henley’s play Ridiculous Fraud climaxes with a family picnic in a cemetery. “Picnics in the graveyard! A great New Orleans tradition,” says Uncle Baites, “Why weep over the dead? We come, we go. We come, we go!” It is the annual Clay...
Talbott’s satire Cheesecake Picnic Party: A Killer Batch of Tasty Treats (2007) evokes the Hollywood film noir. It’s a satire of the so-called cheesecake images of sexy women. Featured Image: David Russell Talbott. Cheesecake Picnic Party: A Killer Batch...
Sweeney Todd and Nellie Lovett’s picnic is a satiric commentary on middle-class values that seems typical, but it’s not quite what it seems. The screenplay describes an ideal setup: “Mrs. Lovett and Todd rest on a picnic blanket, just like any other couple...
Gavron’s picnic in Brick Lane retells Monica Ali’s Bangladeshi family, outwardly happy but inwardly troubled in London’s East End. After twenty years, Nazneen’s arranged marriage to Chanu Ahmed is wobbly. The picnic is supposed to be a lark, but it’s a kind of torture...
