The Kitchen Sisters Present

For almost a dozen years, 34 Black women gathered monthly around a big dining room table in an orange house on Orange Street in Oakland, CA — meeting, cooking, dancing, strategizing — grappling with the issues of eviction, erasure, gentrification, inadequate health care, and the sex trafficking of Black women and girls overwhelming their community.Spearheaded by dancer and choreographer Amara Tabor-Smith and theater director Ellen Sebastian Chang, this House/Full of Black Women — artists, scholars, healers, nurses, midwives, an ice cream maker, a donut maker, an architect, a theater director, a choreographer, sex trafficking abolitionists and survivors — have come together to creatively address and bring their mission and visions to the streets. Over the years they have created performances, rituals, pop-up processions in the storefronts, galleries, warehouses, museums and streets of Oakland.This hour-long special features sound-rich “episodes” of performances and rituals, interviews with sex trafficking abol

Lured in by a blackboard sign on the street in Davia’s neighborhood announcing “Spotlight on Black Entrepreneurs,” we enter the creative and growing world of Black-Owned Pet Businesses. Lick You Silly dog treats, Trill Paws enamel ID Tags, The Dog Father of Harlem's Doggie Day Spa, gorgeous rainbow beaded Dog Collars from The Kenya Collection, Sir Dogwood luxurious modern dog-wear.Chaz Olajide of Sir Dogwood wasn’t finding communities of pet owners or pet businesses owned by people of color. “I did a deep dive into the statistics —I just wanted to see if maybe I was an outlier, like maybe the reason why I’m not seeing more diversity in these companies is because maybe the demand isn’t out there. Actually, you know, that’s not really the case.”“The dog training world—it’s a white dominated space. It’s kind of male dominated, too,” says Taylor Barconey of Smart Bitch Dog Training in New Orleans. “On our profile on Instagram we have Black Lives Matter, it’s been there for a year now. Before 2020, we would have n

Lady Gaga, Marion Anderson, Beyoncé, Frank Sinatra, Pete Seeger, Maya Angelou — musicians and poets have been powerful headliners at inauguration ceremonies across the years signaling change, new beginnings and reflecting the mood of the country and a new administration.In January 1973, following the Christmas bombing of Vietnam, conductor Leonard Bernstein gathered an impromptu orchestra to perform an "anti-inaugural concert" protesting Richard Nixon's official inaugural concert and his escalation of the war in Vietnam. One of the main performances of the official inaugural was the 1812 Overture with its booming drums replicating the sound of war cannons.In 1973, the United States was reaching the concluding stages of our involvement in Vietnam.  And while the war would soon come to an end, the weeks leading up to the second inauguration of Richard Nixon were met with some of the most intense and deadly bombing campaigns of the war.The anti-war movement was unhinged. They had marched, they protested — to see

Edna Lewis was a legendary American chef, a pioneer of Southern cooking and the author of four books, including The Taste of Country Cooking, her memoir cookbook about growing up in Freetown, Virginia, a small farming community of formerly enslaved people and their descendants established in 1866. Before she began writing books, Edna had been a celebrated chef at Cafe Nicholson in New York City in the 1950s where Eleanor Roosevelt, Paul Robeson, Marlon Brando, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and Marlene Dietrich all came for her Southern food and legendary chocolate soufflé.The Taste of Country Cooking chronicled the traditions and recipes of the community where she grew up — a rural settlement that celebrated the events and traditions of daily life across each year with special suppers and ritual meals — Emancipation Day Dinner, Early Spring Dinner after Sheep Shearing, Morning After Hog Butchering Breakfast, Christmas Eve Supper and Christmas Dinner to name but a few of the dishes and stories that fill th

On the occasion of her 80th birthday in 2000, The Kitchen Sisters, along with food writer Peggy Knickerbocker, visited the home of Cecilia Chiang, the legendary Chinese-American restaurateur, chef and founder of The Mandarin Restaurant in San Francisco for a bit of an oral history.Cecilia Chiang introduced regional Chinese cooking to America in the 1960s, revolutionizing what most Americans thought Chinese cooking was. Elegant and savvy, her restaurant drew in celebrities and food enthusiasts, including Pavarotti, John Lennon, Jackie Onassis, Mae West, Henry Kissinger, and others. She inspired James Beard, Marion Cunningham, Alice Waters, Julia Child, and generations of chefs and restaurateurs, including her son Philip, founder of P. F. Chang's. Cecilia died in 2020 at the age of 100.

A pioneer in her field, Catherine Bauer Wurster was advisor to five presidents on urban planning and housing and was one of the primary authors of the Housing Act of 1937. During the 1930s she wrote the influential book Modern Housing and was one of the leaders of the "housers" movement, advocating for affordable housing for low-income families.  Catherine Bauer’s life divided into two names and two geographies:  her urban east coast youth, and her later life in the Bay Area. She hobnobbed with the bohemian elite of the interwar years….brilliantly charming  the big architect names of the Weimar Republic, Paris cafe society, and the International Style:  Gropius, Mies, Corbusier, Oud, May, and her lover, Lewis Mumford. Her glamour and charismatic presence endeared her to trade unionists, labor leaders, and politicians—who she tried to turn to her vision of housing as a worthy responsibility of the government—sexier and leftier during the Depression. Her arguments were a harder sell in the red scare fifties and

Pushed to the side and rarely credited for her architectural work at Davis Brody, Phyllis Birkby became a significant figure in extending the lesbian women's movement to architecture during the 1970s. Her environmental fantasy workshops played a crucial role in galvanizing the community, providing a creative and empowering space within a male-dominated profession. Growing out of other consciousness raising techniques, freed up in her classes, Phyllis released the rigor of her conventional training to get down on the floor,  and lead the group in sketching their fantasies however outlandish on giant rolls of butcher paper. She encouraged the women to imagine architecture above, below, and beyond the norm. Birkby's work not only contributed to architectural discourse but also fostered a sense of collective identity among lesbian architects, highlighting the intersectionality of gender, sexuality, and professional identity in the field. In her later years, she focused on architecture for people marginalized in o

It is Tuesday, November 5, 2024, the day when millions of Americans go to the polls to vote for who will lead their towns, their states, the nation. Souls to the polls today across the country, and so much hangs in the balance.On this fraught and tender Tuesday, when all our nerves are frayed, we offer a moment of respite and contemplation — an episode of the podcast Constellation Prize from radio producer and filmmaker Bianca Giaever, featuring writer, poet and activist Terry Tempest Williams.Constellation Prize is a podcast from The Believer Magazine. This story is Episode 1 of a 4 part series. You can hear the whole Nightwalking series and more episodes of Constellation Prize wherever you find your podcasts.Our thanks to Bianca, The Believer, and the poet laureate of nightwalking, Terry Tempest Williams, for allowing us to share this story.The music in Nightwalking is by Ishmael Ensemble, John Carroll Kirby and Elori Saxl. Our theme music is "Day of the Dead" by Ted Savarese.We’re dropping this podcast on

July 17, 2024, Washington, D.C. Some 200 young people from across the nation aged 14-19 — aspiring poets, storytellers, MC's, activists — are gathered in the nation’s capital for the 29th annual Brave New Voices Festival — four non-stop days of slam poetry competition, coaching, workshops, late-night freestyling and in 2024, voting information.In summer, as the election loomed larger and larger we decided to turn our microphone to young people across America to hear their thoughts and feelings about the nation, about voting, about the election. Everyone always says young people are the future. But the truth is they are the present. And it is all on their plate.The Kitchen Sisters and producer Bianca Giaever traveled to the Brave New Voices Festival to take in the poets and their poetry, to listen and take the pulse of the moment. The hope, the scope, the vote. On July 21, the day after the festival ended, President Biden dropped out of the race. Keep that in mind as you listen.  The Hope & The Scope was p

Today, The Kitchen Sisters Present: “Tupperware” — an homage and a eulogy.It was 1980. Nikki and I had just met. We had just named ourselves The Kitchen Sisters. And we had just bought our first cassette recorder, a Sony TC-D5M. We hadn’t even taken it out of the box or been trained on it when we were invited to a Tupperware party our friend Kirsten was hosting. This was 1980 in Santa Cruz, a stronghold of the women’s movement. You just didn’t get invited to too many Tupperware parties back then.It seemed the perfect moment to break out the Sony and tape the party. The party was such a bonanza of story and plastic we went to another and taped that too. This time the Tupperware lady invited us and our new tape recorder to Tupperware headquarters in Salinas where Tupperware ladies were trained and where sales rallies were held.  We went back to the studio at our local community radio station with a ton of tape and no real idea of what to do with it. These were analog days, days of cassettes and reel-to-reels, o

As elections loom, we need to get involved, step up to the civic plate, take part in discourse. And that’s what Manny Yekutiel has been driven to do since 2018. He’s created a community-focused meeting place in San Francisco — a gathering space for people to watch presidential debates, meet people working on the front lines of social change, and discuss issues with policy makers in person. From community forums debating the new trash can designs in San Francisco, to town hall meetings with political candidates for the Senate and the Presidency, Manny’s is a place to commune, listen, and be heard.They’ve got a restaurant — Farming Hope, a non-profit that hires formerly homeless and formerly incarcerated individuals and trains them in the food skills needed to work in the restaurant industry. They’ve got a bookstore specializing in local history and politics — with no pressure to buy books.As church basements and social clubs fade as places where young people feel comfortable gathering, Manny has created a plac

There was a moment at the 2024 Democratic National Convention when Oprah took the stage — and the crowd went wild. She spoke boldly about Kamala Harris and her place in a long line of strong Black women who have paved the way. At one point she veered into the story of Tessie Prevost Williams, who recently passed away,  and the New Orleans Four.November 14, 1960 — Four six-year-old girls— Leona Tate, Gail Etienne, Tessie Prevost and Ruby Bridges—flanked by Federal Marshals, walked through screaming crowds and policemen on horseback as they approached their new schools for the first time. Leona Tate thought it must be Mardi Gras. Gail thought they were going to kill her. Tessie Prevost's mother was scared to death handing over her daughter to a Federal Marshal for protection from the mob.Four years after the Supreme Court ruled to desegregate schools in Brown v. Board of Education, schools in the South were dragging their feet. Finally, in 1960, the NAACP and a daring judge selected two schools in New Orleans t

On the night of Summer Solstice 1986, Larry Harvey and Jerry James built and burned an eight-foot wooden figure on San Francisco's Baker Beach surrounded by a handful of friends. Burning Man was born.This summer, the 39th annual Burning Man gathering begins to assemble on a vast dry lake bed in Nevada's Black Rock Desert, the nomadic ritual's home since 1990. An estimated 80,000 people will come.During production of our Keepers series, chronicling activist archivists, rogue librarians and keepers of the culture and free flow of information, we received this message on the Keepers Hotline:"Hello Kitchen Sisters, I am a rogue archivist, the archivist for Burning Man. Come to Burning Man headquarters and I’ll show you the collection. Cheers.” —LadyBee, Archivist & Art Collection Manager, Burning ManHow do you archive an event when one of it's driving principles is "leave no trace," where The Burning Man is in fact burned? What is being kept and who is keeping it? We journey into the archives of this legendar

In honor of the Paris Olympics and the astounding contribution of the French to culture and art of the world, The Kitchen Sisters Present, Archive Fever: Henri Langlois and the history of the Cinémathèque Française, featuring Francis Ford Coppola, Wim Wenders, Tom Luddy, Lotte Eisner, Simone Signoret, Agnes Varda, Costa-Gavras, Barbet Schroeder.Henri Langlois never made a single film — but he's considered one of the most important figures in the history of filmmaking. Possessed by what French philosopher Jacques Derrida called "archive fever," Langlois began obsessively collecting films in the 1930s and by the outset of World War II, he had one of the largest film collections in the world. The archive's impact on the history of French cinema is legendary, as is the legacy of its controversial keeper.Langlois fell in love with film in his teens, just as silent films were being replaced by talkies. "In the early 30s they were destroying every silent movie," says film director Costa-Gavras, now president of Lang

San Francisco officially declared July 15th Linda Ronstadt Day. In her honor, The Kitchen Sisters Present this story about her book, Feels Like Home, about her family, and the food, culture and music of the borderland of Arizona and Mexico where she is rooted.  Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands is an historical, musical, edible memoir that spans the story of five generations of Linda’s Mexican American German family, from the Sonoran desert in Mexico to the Ronstadt family hardware store in Tucson to the road that led Linda to LA and musical stardom. Intimate and epic, "this is little Linda, Mexican Linda, cowgirl Linda, desert Linda."The book, written in collaboration with New York Times writer Lawrence Downes, is a road trip through the Sonoran Borderlands, from Tucson to Banámichi, Mexico — the path Linda’s immigrant grandfather took at a time when the border was not a place of peril but of possibility.We went to see Linda at home to ask her about the journey.This story was produced by Th

Route 66—The Main Street of America— the first continuously paved highway linking east and west was the most traveled and well known road in the US for almost fifty years. From Chicago, through the Ozarks, across Oklahoma, the Texas Panhandle, up the mesas of New Mexico and Arizona, and down into California to the Pacific Ocean. The first road of its kind, it came to represent America’s mobility and freedom—inspiring countless stories, songs, and even a TV show.Songwriter Bobby Troup tells the story of his 1946 hit “Get Your Kicks on Route 66.” Mickey Mantle says, “If it hadn’t been for US 66 I wouldn’t have been a Yankee.” Stirling Silliphant, creator of the TV series “Route 66” talks about the program and its place in American folklore of the 60s.Studs Terkel reads from The Grapes of Wrath about the "Mother Road," and the great 1930s migration along Highway 66. We hear from musicians who recall what life on the road during the 1930s was like for them, including Clarence Love, Woody Guthrie, and Eldin Shambl

In 1977, a cavernous, rarely used sculpture gallery in the Brooklyn Museum was filled with drafting tables, their tops tilted to display collages of the work and under-told stories of women working in architecture in the United States.We revisit this first significant effort to publicly tell the little known stories of American women in architecture: “Women in American Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective.” On view at the Brooklyn Museum from February-April of 1977, the groundbreaking exhibition and simultaneous book, curated and edited by Susana Torre, clearly defined the state of play for women in the architecture profession. Alienated by the profound hostility expressed by the AIA, women architects came together and found an accepting cohort at the Architectural League of New York. They organized. They canvassed. They raised their consciousnesses. The project team identified subjects so previously obscured as to be unknown, and then with the energy and drive of a furious mob, they broke th

As this year's hurricane season ramps up, we go to New Orleans for a kind of biblical reckoning. A story of science and prayer, with a cast of improbable partners—environmental architects and nuns—coming together to create a vision for living with water in New Orleans. Mirabeau Water Garden, one of the largest urban wetlands in the country designed to educate, inspire and to save its neighborhood from flooding.New Orleans. Surrounded by The Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, besieged by hurricanes and tropical storms, permeated with man made canals, levees, pumping stations …. Water is a deep and controversial issue in New Orleans. What to do with it? Where to put it? How to get rid of it? How to live with it?David Waggonner, of Waggonner & Ball architecture and environment firm has been thinking and dreaming about these questions for years. One of the primary architects behind the Greater New Orleans Urban Water Plan, David envisions floating streets, pervious pavement, planting bioswales—“living

On February 16, 2024 Russian dissident Alexei Navalny died under unexplained circumstances in a penal colony in the Russian Arctic just weeks before the election that enthroned Vladimir Putin for another six years of near-absolute power. Within days of Navalny’s death his wife Yulia Navalnaya rose up, spoke out and vowed to continue her husband’s struggle. A decade ago The Kitchen Sisters were in Moscow reporting for our NPR series Hidden Kitchens: War and Peace and Food. We were at lunch with writer, television journalist and government critic, Victor Erofeyev and asked what his hidden kitchen was. “Dissident Kitchens,” he said. “The Soviet Union fell apart because of the kitchen.” We started digging. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, millions of people poured into Moscow from the countryside, many living crammed together in the appropriated grand apartments of the wealthy — a single, communal kitchen shared by the ten or so families squeezed together under one roof. Spaces were crowded, food scarce, pri

On April 12, 2024, Eleanor Coppola, artist, filmmaker, mother and wife of director Francis Ford Coppola, died at her home in the Napa Valley surrounded by family. She was 87 years old and had lived a most remarkable life.Shortly before her death, Eleanor had completed her third memoir. In it she wrote:“I appreciate how my unexpected life has stretched and pulled me in so many extraordinary ways and taken me in a multitude of directions beyond my wildest imaginings.”On May 6, 2008, on the occasion of the release of her second memoir, Notes on a Life, Eleanor and Davia sat down together at The Commonwealth Club of California and had this conversation before a live audience.Our thanks to The Commonwealth Club of California for sharing this 2008 recording. This conversation was part of their Good Lit Series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation.The Kitchen Sisters' San Francisco studio is located in Francis and Eleanor's Zoetrope building in North Beach. Ellie has been a part of our lives since the day we