In August, 2021, a group of young Afghan women journalists, musicians and activists fled their country in fear for their lives when the Taliban took over their nation. These women are navigating life today in the US.

Many of these women were well known in their country as TV personalities, women wearing western clothing, their hair uncovered, who interviewed women and men on the popular morning news shows.

“My background in the TV was one of biggest reasons for them to kill me,” says Taban Ibraz. “To do anything they want to do with me like they did with a lot of women in Afghanistan. They were targeting us.”

Maryam Yousifi, journalist and clothing designer remembers, “I saw that my mother's crying. And she's saying that we have to hide you somewhere. We can’t keep you here because people knows our address. She gave me a hijab and she said, please wear this. She never told me that never, ever. She never told me that what should I wear.”

The women were assisted by the nonprofit, Restore Her Voice, set up to help Afghan women, who had been in media or the arts, get out of Afghanistan and to help support them once they arrived in the United States.

Special thanks to Taban Ibraz, Anaitza Walizada, Maryam Yousifi, Helal Massomi, Elham Karimi, Marika Partridge, Lori Davis, Ed James and Ajmal Subat. Thanks also to The Daily Antidote Podcast.

Special thanks to writer and photographer Valerie Plesch for her article and photographs in the DCist that inspired this story. 

Thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts, The Kaleta Doolin Foundation, The Texas Women's Foundation and listener contributions to The Kitchen Sisters Productions for the funding that makes these stories possible.

The Kitchen Sisters Present... is part of Radiotopia, an independent, story driven, carefully crafted podcast network from PRX.

196 -  Afghan Women Refugees in America (Rebroadcast)

A blind oud player from humble beginnings, Sheikh Imam’s destiny changed drastically when he met a dissident poet called Ahmed Fouad Negm in 1960s Cairo, and they formed a duo. Together, they would go on start a new era in Egyptian popular music.

Their songs would shake regimes, travel the world on cassette tapes, and transcend their own time to become part of the soundtrack to Egypt’s revolution decades later. And they managed all of this while dealing with constant harassment by the state - including long periods in prison.

The story features two historians, one of Sheikh Imam’s collaborators, and a university lecturer who’s parents used to host Sheikh Imam’s concerts in their living room. The songs in this episode were composed and performed by Sheikh Imam and written by Ahmed Fouad Negm and Zein Alabidin Fouad. Lyric translations by Ahmed Hassan and Elliott Colla.

This episode was produced by Kerning Cultures Podcast—Nadeen Shaker, Heba El-Sherif, and Alex Atack, and edited by Dana Ballout. Fact checking was by Deena Sabry and sound design, music, and mixing by Monzer El Hachem. Voice over by Eihab Seoudi, and translation help from Maha El Kady. Cover art by Ahmad Salhab.

Many thanks to Kerning Cultures / Stories from the Middle East, North Africa, and the spaced in between.

195 - Sheikh Imam: Egypt's Voice of Dissent

Originally a Filipino restaurant and music club, The Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco’s North Beach transformed into a mecca for Bay Area punk and New Wave bands in the 1970s and 80s. The Avengers, the Nuns, The Dead Kennedys, Pearl Harbor and the Explosions, The Tubes, and so many others performed regularly at the club on Broadway.

As the original Mabuhay Gardens, which featured Filipino celebrities and musical acts, fell on hard times, promoter Dirk Dirksen convinced club owner Ness Aquino to let him book bands on Monday and Tuesday nights. Soon the nights expanded and the club was packing in a growing young punk rock audience.

Dirkson, the “Pope of Punk“ was the abrasive MC, whose insults baited the audience to heighten the energy of the club. He lured in big names like Nico, The Dead Boys, Patti Smith, the Runaways and connected the Mabuhay Gardens with the English punk scene helping to spread punk rock globally.

“To play, you need a place – be it where you live, the street, a venue.  For unrestricted play, you need an unrestricted playground.  Dirk Dirksen envisioned The Fab Mab just as such a playground.  Without him and The Mab, there might not have been the great punk scene in the late 1970s in San Francisco.  The San Francisco punk scene was fun.  I miss it.  But as Iggy Pop said, ‘Let’s Sing.'”  
                                                                                                                              — Mindy Bagdon

Special thanks to Denise Demise Dunne, Liz Keim, Penelope Houston, Ron Greco, John Seabury, V Vale, Janet Clyde, and Kathy Peck. The archival interview with Dirk Dirksen is from Vale's RE/Search Conversations 13.

We would like to dedicate this story to Mindy Bagdon (1934-2022), who brought warmth and kindness to every community he touched throughout his many years in San Francisco.  

Produced by Brandi Howell with production support from Mary Franklin Harvin.

194 - From Pinoy to Punk — The Rise of the Mabuhay Gardens

The story of a group of young Afghan women journalists, musicians and activists, how they fled their country in fear for their lives when the Taliban took over their nation, and how they are navigating life today in the US.

Many of these women were well known in their country as TV personalities, women wearing western clothing, their hair uncovered, who interviewed women and men on the popular morning news shows.

“My background in the TV was one of biggest reason for them to kill me,” says Taban Ibraz. “To do anything they want to do with me like they did with a lot of women in Afghanistan.  They were targeting us.”

Maryam Yousifi, journalist and clothing designer remembers, “I saw that my mother's crying. And she's saying that we have to hide you somewhere. We can’t keep you here because people knows our address. She gave me a hijab and she said, please wear this. She never told me that never, ever. She never told me that what should I wear.”

The women were assisted by the nonprofit, Restore Her Voice, set up to help Afghan women, who had been in media or the arts, get out of Afghanistan and to help support them once they arrived in the United States.

Special thanks to Taban Ibraz, Anaitza Walizada, Maryam Yousifi, Helal Massomi, Elham Karimi, Marika Patridge, Lori Davis, Ed James and Ajmal Subat. Thanks also to The Daily Antidote Podcast and to writer/photographer Valerie Plesch for inspiring this story and sharing her photographs with The Kitchen Sisterhood.

Special thanks to writer and photographer Valerie Plesch for her article in the DCist that inspired this story.  To see photographs and more about this story, plus an interview with Tanya Henderson, Founder and President of Mina’s List, a non-profit advancing women’s political leadership and global peace, are on our website, kitchensisters.org

Thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts, The Kaleta Doolin Foundation, The Texas Women's Foundation and listener contributions to The Kitchen Sisters Productions for the funding that makes these stories possible.

The Kitchen Sisters Present... is part of Radiotopia, an independent, story driven, carefully crafted podcast network from PRX.

193 - Afghan Women Refugees in America

Long before there was Coachella, Outside Lands Festival, and the popular music gatherings of today, the Monterey Pop Festival was the first of its kind. Taking place in the fairgrounds of Monterey in the summer of 1967, the three-day festival brought to the stage the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and The Who.  Their performances are now viewed as legendary markers in the history of rock and roll, but at the time, Jimi and Janis were newcomers to the rock scene. These debut appearances introduced them to the rest of the world and  helped revolutionize the entire landscape of rock and roll music to come.

In this episode, Darice Murray-McKay, Jonathan King, and Rosalie Howarth recount their experiences as young teenagers attending the legendary music festival.  Additional commentary is provided by famed music critic Joel Selvin.

Produced by Kitchen Sisters’ producer, Brandi Howell. Check out her podcast, The Echo Chamber, about music and its impact on culture.

192 -  Monterey Pop Festival Revisited

The Egg Wars—a hidden Gold Rush kitchen—when food was scarce and men died for eggs.

We travel out to the forbidding Farallon Islands, 27 miles outside San Francisco’s Golden Gate, home to the largest seabird colony in the United States. Over 250,000 birds on 14 acres.

But it wasn’t always so. One hundred seventy years ago it was the site of the “Egg Wars.” During the 1850s, egg hunters gathered over 3 million eggs, violently competing with each other, and nearly stripping the island bare.

In 1969 the Point Reyes Bird observatory began working to protect the Farallones. The islands had been through a lot. The devastating fur trade of the 1800s. The Egg Wars. During WWII the Islands were used as a secret navy installation with over 70 people living on the island. From 1946-1970 nearly 50,000 drums of radioactive waste were dumped in the Farallon waters. Fisherman often shot high powered rifles at sea lions and helicopters were causing whales and other animals to panic.

Today the Farallones are off limits to all but researchers, some who live out on the desolate island for months in the old lighthouse there. Surrounded by thousands of birds, they wear hard hats to keep the gulls from dive bombing their heads.

The Islands are a sanctuary—The Farallon National Wildlife Refuge, managed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service.  The Kitchen Sisters were given permission to travel out to the islands on one of the supply runs that goes out to the islands 2 times a month. 

The Farrallon National Wildlife Refuge is managed by US Fish and Wildlife Service

Our story features: Gary Kamiya, journalist and author; Mary Jane Schram, Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary; Peter Pyle, Farallon Biologist;  Ava Crosante, Illustrator;  Peter White, Author of Farallon Islands—Sentinels of the Golden Gate;  Skipper Roger Cunningham; Pete Warzybok, Scientist Farallon Islands; Russ Bradly, Farallon Program Leader for Point Blue Conservation Science. 

Special thanks to: Melissa Pitkin, Point Blue Conservation;  Doug Cordell and the San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge Complex; Edward Jenkins; Julia Gulka; Sean Gee; Keith Hansen, Eve Williams, Gerry McChesnwey; and the Farallon Marine Sanctuary.

The Kitchen Sisters Present is produced by The Kitchen Sisters, Nikki Silva and Davia Nelson, with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell. We are part of PRX’s Radiotopia Network.

191—The Egg Wars and the Farallon Islands

As an architect, Florence Knoll was the force behind the seamless integration of furniture, space, textile, art, graphic design into a perfect brand concept: Total Design.  She revolutionized  office design and bringing modernist design to office interiors. She defined the modern corporate interiors of post-war America. Take a listen to this little known story of an amazing, little known architect and designer. Her influence transcends the specific disciplines, she was the force integrating them, and in her work at the Knoll Planning Unit, she promulgated the values that still motivate architects and designers today: solve the program with scale and detailing appropriate to the interior in support of how people behave in the active environment.

This story was produced by New Angle: Voice of the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation with host Cynthia Phifer Kracauer, AIA. Podcast production by Brandi Howell.

190 - Florence Knoll: Total Design

Late last year Hillary Rodham Clinton and best-selling Canadian mystery writer, Louise Penny, came out with a ripping geo-political thriller called State of Terror that quickly hit the New York Times Best Seller List.

At about that same time, Secretary Clinton’s former close aide, Deputy Chief of Staff, and the vice chair of her 2016 presidential campaign, Huma Abedin, came out with her memoir, Both/And: A Life in Many Worlds, a story of her roots and the path that led her to work with the First Lady and the triumphs and controversies of her life.

The two were crisscrossing the country separately on book tours at the same time. One night they both found themselves in San Francisco and were asked to be onstage together to talk about their new books. Davia Nelson was asked to be in conversation with them that evening and plugged in to the sound board. Here’s an edited version of the night with a few surprises added in.

State of Terror comes out in paperback in June, and Huma’s book comes out in paperback in September. The wonderful actress Joan Allen reads the audio book version of Hillary and Louise Penny’s bestseller and Huma reads her own beautiful audiobook.

The Kitchen Sisters Present is proud member of Radiotopia, a network of independent, story driven, truth seeking, heart cracking podcasts from PRX.

189 - Hillary and Huma

Helen Fong, one of the few women practicing architecture in the US in the 1950s, is best known for her “Googie” California coffee shop architectural style. Pann’s Coffee Shop, Denny's, Bob's Big Boy— those bold, iconic, futuristic restaurants of the 1950s and 60s— there are thousands of them, not just in Los Angeles, where they were born, but across the country. These family restaurants are core to how America defined itself after World War II. Cars, families, space flight, modernism....the new world order. Pioneering architect Helen Fong helped define that futuristic look.

Helen Fong was born in Los Angeles’ Chinatown in 1927. One of five children she grew up working in the family’s laundry business. In 1949 she received a degree in city planning from UC Berkeley, moved back to Los Angeles and got her first job working as a secretary for architect Eugene Choy. Two years later, she began working for Armet and Davis, well known for its work in the “Googie” architectural style.

Modern, wild, whimsical—some of Fong’s most famous projects include Pann’s Restaurant, Johnie’s Coffee Shop, and Holiday Bowl, created to catch the eye of America’s fast growing car culture of the 1950s and 60s.

This story was produced by New Angle: Voice of the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation with host Cynthia Phifer Kracauer, AIA. Podcast production by Brandi Howell.

188 - Fast Food and Radical Rooflines: Helen Fong Shapes Los Angeles Coffee Shops

Norma Sklarek (1926-2012) had many “firsts”. She was often credited at the start of her career as the first Black Women architect to be licensed in the United States. That distinction actually goes to Beverly Greene – Norma was the 3rd. But it didn’t matter. Young Black girls read her name in the likes of Ebony Magazine – a staple publication in Black households at the time – when she was included in their 1958 article on “Successful Young Architects.”  As more and more discovered her career, she became their role model.

Born in 1926, in Harlem, Sklarek was the only child of Walter Ernest Merrick, a doctor, and Amy Merrick, a seamstress, both of whom had immigrated from Trinidad. She grew up in Harlem and Brooklyn, and attended predominately white schools, including Hunter College High School, a selective public school for girls, where she excelled in math and science and showed talent in the fine arts. Her aptitude for math and art prompted her father to suggest architecture as a career.

She attended Barnard College and the School of Architecture at Columbia University. Many of her classmates were veterans of World War II, some had bachelor’s or master’s degrees . “The competition was keen,” she said. “But I had a stick-to-it attitude and never gave up.”

After graduating from Columbia, Sklarek faced discrimination in her search for work as an architect, applying to and being rejected by nineteen firms.  In 1954 she took the architecture licensing examination, passed it on her first try and became the first licensed African American woman architect in the state of New York.

In 1955, Sklarek was offered a position in the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.  During this period, she was a single mother of two children.  Her mother cared for her children while Sklarek worked. 1959, she became the first African American woman member of the American Institute of Architects. In 1960, after five years at SOM, she took a job at Gruen Associates in Los Angeles. She also served on the architecture faculty at University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Southern California.

in 1985, she cofounded the woman-owned firm, Siegel Sklarek Diamond, with Margot Siegel and Katherine Diamond. At the time, it was the largest woman-owned architectural firm in the United States, and Sklarek was the first African American woman to co-own an architectural practice.

This story was produced by New Angle: Voice of the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation with host Cynthia Phifer Kracauer, AIA. Podcast production by Brandi Howell.

187 - Norma Sklarek: An Extremely Bold Hand

Coal + Ice, a powerful global exhibition of photographs, videos, and immersive imagery that focuses on the climate crisis and provokes action is now on display in Washington DC through April 22, 2022.

Coal + Ice began in Beijing in 2011 with the unprecedented showing of images of Chinese coal miners taken by Chinese photographers. It has now now expanded to the work of 50 photographers from around the world, capturing images of the climate catastrophe as it unfolds around the globe.

Photographers and video artists include:  Jimmy Chin, David Breashears, Song Chao, Camille Seaman, Gideon Mendel, Meredith Kohut, Jamey Stillings, Matt Black, Barbara Kopple, Dana Lixenberg and historical work from Robert Capa, Lewis Hine, Gordon Parks, Eugene Smith, Bruce Davidson and others. Coal + Ice also features installations, panels, music, conversations, cash awards to young artists weaving climate into their work and more.

For over a decade the exhibit has traveled the world evolving and expanding as the climate crisis unfolds. First Beijing, then Delhi, then Paris, Shanghai, San Francisco and now in Washington DC at the Kennedy Center through April 22, 2022.

Before the Pandemic, when Coal + Ice came to a massive exhibition hall on a pier in San Francisco, we traveled through the exhibit with our microphone.  Special thanks to Susan Meiseles, Orville Schell, Geng Yunsheng, …. Michael Tilson Thomas,  Joshua Robison, Gideon Mendel and Jeroen de Vries.

Coal + Ice was produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva) and Evan Jacoby with help from Brandi Howell and Nathan Dalton. Mixed by Jim McKee at Earwax Productions.

186 - Coal + Ice: Visualizing the Climate Crisis

Natalie de Blois loved systems – understanding how things worked.  For her, it wasn’t just pretty buildings, she challenged the code and questioned the status quo. And like the buildings she designed, there was a certain complexity to Natalie herself.  She was a woman of resilient beauty, inspiring yet distant, ahead of her time.

Natalie de Blois (1921–2013),  a pioneering woman architect, contributed to some of the most iconic modernist works for corporate America, all while raising four children.  After leaving a significant mark on post-war NYC Park Avenue, she transferred to the Skidmore Owings and Merrill Chicago office, where she became actively involved in the architecture feminist movement and was one of the leaders in the newly formed Chicago Women in Architecture advocacy group.  Later, she finished her career as a professor at UT Austin, where she trained a future generation of architects.

The Kitchen Sisters Present Episode 2 from New Angle: Voice, produced by Brandi Howell with editorial advising from Alexandra Lange.

New Angle: Voice is a new podcast exploring the lives and careers of female pioneers of American Architecture brought to you by the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, with support from Miller Knoll and SOM.

Special thanks to Matt Alvarez and Iowa Public Radio for their production assistance. Thanks also to Gabrielle Esperdy, Audrey Matlock, Carol Krinsky, Carol Ross Barney, Margaret McCurry, Peter Dixon, John Newman, Liz Watykus, Julia Murphy and Robert de Blois.  The archival audio of Natalie de Blois interviewed by Betty Blum is from the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago Architects Oral History Project.  Thank you to Nathaniel Parks, Director of the  Art Institute of Chicago Archives, for help with this recording.

185 - Natalie de Blois — To Tell the Truth

We first caught sight of him in a convenience store buying Marlboros and a Coke for the road. He was dressed in a grey jumpsuit, pants tucked into black boots, silver belt buckle and a large black Stetson hat. Out front, his Ford Ranchero pick-up idled in the parking lot, the words “Champion of the Stranded Traveler” emblazoned in gold on the door. We struck up a conversation.

“I go on the road looking for trouble and whenever I find some, I stop.”  His voice was deep and resonant, his timing, impeccable.  “I suppose that’s why they call me “The Bloodhound of Breakdown.  But then, my business is trouble.” He lit a cigarette and handed us his card — “The Road Ranger — Scourge of the Tow Hook and the Long Delay.”

We go out on patrol with The Road Ranger in one of the first stories produced by The Kitchen Sisters.

This bonus episode is part of a special Radiotopia-wide project. This week, shows across the network are releasing episodes on the theme “Making Trouble.” You can learn more and donate to support our work at radiotopia.fm.

184 - The Road Ranger—My Business Is Trouble

Cheap rotisserie chicken sold everywhere in markets and grocery outlets. Why is that chicken so cheap? How was it raised and what’s even in it? How much would it cost for farms to raise a chicken you could feel good? What would it taste like? Where can you find one of these chickens now? And why is it so hard to find them?

The Kitchen Sisters Present the first episode of What You’re Eating, a brand new podcast from FoodPrint.org. In this episode host Jerusha Klemperer talks to food policy experts, food label certifiers, farmers and more to dig into the economics, agriculture and taste of chicken.

FoodPrint.org is dedicated to research and education on more sustainable approaches to food production and consumption and ways we can improve things and take action to make real change in the food system.

183 - That Cheap, Delicious, Rotisserie Chicken

In the early 20th century, the largest employer of Black men in the United States was the Pullman Car Company, which operated luxurious trains that carried millions of passengers around the booming nation in an era before airplanes and interstate highways. Ever since the company’s founding during the Civil War, Pullman exclusively hired Black men as porters to keep the train cars clean and serve the white passengers. Although the job was prestigious, by the 1920s porters were fed up with the low pay, long hours, and abusive conditions. Their struggle to unionize became one of the most significant civil rights conflicts of the pre-WWII era and laid the groundwork for the movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. in later years.

Produced by Liam O’Donoghue for his podcast East Bay Yesterday, this story explores how Oakland’s C.L. Dellums helped the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters triumph over one of the nation’s most powerful corporations, and also his massive impact on challenging widespread racial discrimination throughout California. Dellums helped make jobs in wartime industries available to Black workers, setting the stage for the “second great migration” on the West Coast; he organized early protests against police brutality; and he helped end widespread racial segregation among powerful labor unions. His goal was nothing short of “total freedom and equality.”

With special guest Susan D. Anderson, the History Curator and Program Manager at the California African American Museum, and the author of a forthcoming book on California’s Black history. This episode also features a segment from the **Black Liberation Walking Tour **which includes the voices of C.L. Dellums and his daughter Marva.  Many thanks to Liam O’Donoghue for sharing his work on The Kitchen Sisters Present.

182 - "The porters were fed up." C.L. Dellums and the rise of America's first Black union

The Wooster Group, perched on a street corner in Soho in downtown New York, at the forefront of experimental theater for some 40 years. Singular, rigorous, flamboyant. Their startling performances unravel and transform classic texts by Brecht, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Eugene O’Neill... along with their own striking original works. Six Obies, nine Bessies, accolades from around the world as they tour their works through Europe and Asia.

Theater. One of the more ephemeral of art forms. How to preserve the work, chronicle it, archive it for the ages? Yes, there are scripts, props, sets, costumes — a pair of muddy shoes from a 1981 production of Route 1 & 9. But what if you're experimental theater? Devoted to process, improvisation, the dense layering of ideas and texts and sound and image, performances ever-changing? Obsessed with preserving everything—every rehearsal, every production meeting, every performance. How do you catalog something in a constant state of flux?

Clay Hapaz entered the universe of The Wooster Group as an intern in 1992. In 2000 he became their official archivist.

Voices you’ll hear include Clay Hapaz, Kate Valk, Frances McDormand, Hilton Als, Peter Sellars, Spalding Gray and Elizabeth LeCompte.

Produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva) and Evan Jacoby in collaboration with Brandi Howell and Nathan Dalton. Mixed by Jim McKee.  

Special Thanks: Clay Hapaz, Kate Valk, Frances McDormand, Juliet Lashinsky-Revene, Hilton Als, Peter Sellars, Fran & Kate’s Drama Club and Elizabeth LeCompte. 

Music: Matt Dougherty and The Wooster Group’s archive. 

Thanks also to Lumi Tan, Lewanne Jones and Claire Maske.

Support for the Stories comes from The National Endowment for the Arts & Listener Contributions to The Kitchen Sisters Productions (Many thanks)

The Kitchen Sisters Present is part of the Radiotopia Podcast Network on PRX. Thanks for listening

181 - The Accidental Archivist—Keeping the Wooster Group

On Sunday, December 19, 2021, The Cleveland Clinic and five other major health care institutions in Northeastern Ohio took out a full page ad in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the largest newspaper in the region. Simple and stark, the page was blank, save for the word—HELP—written in bold black letters.

Today the health care system of the region is nearing its breaking point with over 1700 hundred healthcare givers in the area  out either with COVID-19 and its variants or in quarantine from having been exposed. Ohio is one of six states accounting for more than half of the nations’ recent COVID hospitalizations.  Over 55% of Ohioans are unvaccinated and it is mostly unvaccinated people filling the hospitals there.

In the first year of the pandemic we presented the story The Great Amish Pandemic Sewing Frolic, centered in this same part of Ohio.  When we saw the word HELP we thought it was time to reprise this story and shine a light on a time in the pandemic when people pulled together to help keep one another safe.

The story begins In April 2020.  The pandemic is roaring, PPE is scarce and the supply chains are breaking down.  A New York Times headline catches our eye: “Abe Make a Sewing Frolic” — In Ohio The Amish Take on the Coronavirus. This isolated, centuries-old, self-reliant community was rising to the occasion and collaborating with the outside world to fill the PPE needs of the massive Cleveland Clinic and beyond.

Artist Laurie Anderson helps narrate this story produced by The Kitchen Sisters, Outskirts Productions, designer Stacy Hoover, and producer Evan Jacoby.
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180 - The Great Amish Pandemic Sewing Frolic

She rose every day at dusk and rehearsed, performed, ate and drank until dawn. Then slept all day, woke up and began to create and unravel again as the sun went down. Nearly every song Edith Piaf sang came from a moment of her life on the streets of Paris. She would tell her composer and musician lovers a story, or describe a feeling or show them a gesture and they would put music and words to her pain and passion, giving her back her own musical autobiography. Charles Aznavour, Francis Lai, Georges Moustaki, Henri Contet, some of France’s great musicians and writers recall their nights with Edith Piaf.

The Nights of Edith Piaf was produced by The Kitchen Sisters with Don Drucker, mixed by Robin Wise for Soundprint in collaboration with Raquel Bitton, who hosts and translates the program.

179 - The Nights of Edith Piaf

Hidden Kitchens, the duPont-Columbia and James Beard Award winning radio series on NPR’s Morning Edition, explores the world of unexpected, below the radar cooking, legendary meals and eating traditions — how communities come together through food.

With host Frances McDormand this collection of stories chronicles kitchen cultures, past and present including: An Unexpected Kitchen—The George Foreman Grill;  Georgia Gilmore and the Club from Nowhere—A Secret Civil Rights Kitchen;  A Prison Kitchen Vision;  the Ojibwe Harvest on Big Rice Lake; Hidden Kitchen Calling from from around the country,  and more.

Produced by The Kitchen Sisters and Jay Allison and mixed by Jim McKee. Made possible by in part by The National Endowment for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Humanities, and contributors to The Kitchen Sisters Productions.

178- Hidden Kitchens - With Host Frances McDormand

One hundred-twenty-five years after he was arrested for sitting down in a whites-only train car, Homer Plessy may be pardoned for his crime. In 1896 his landmark case, Plessy V. Ferguson, went before the Supreme Court which ruled to uphold "separate but equal" racial segregation which remained in effect until 1954.

In June,1892, Homer Plessy, a mixed race shoemaker in New Orleans, was arrested, convicted and fined $25 for taking a seat in a whites-only train car. This was not a random act. It was a carefully planned move by the Citizen’s Committee, an activist group of Free People of Color, to fight a new law being enacted in Louisiana which threatened to re-impose segregation as the reforms made after the Civil War began to dissolve.

The Citizen’s Committee recruited Homer Plessy, a light skinned black man, to board a train and get arrested in order to push the case to the Supreme Court in hopes of a decision that would uphold equal rights. Homer’s case was defeated 7 to 1. The case sharply divided the nation racially and its defeat “gave teeth” to Jim Crow.

The “separate but equal” decision not only applied to public transportation it spread into every aspect of life — schools, public toilets, public eating places. For some 58 years it was not recognized as unconstitutional until the Brown V. Public Education case was decided in 1954.

Homer Plessy died in 1925 and his conviction for breaking the law remained on his record. Now, 125 years after his arrest, the Louisiana Board of Pardons voted unanimously to recommend that Homer Plessy be pardoned for his crime. The pardon was spearheaded by Keith Plessy, a descendent of Homer Plessy, and Phoebe Ferguson, the great, great granddaughter of John Howard Ferguson, the convicting judge in the case.  The two have joined forces digging deep into this complex, little known story – setting the record straight, and working towards truth and reconciliation in the courtrooms, on the streets and in the schools of New Orleans and across the nation.

The Plessy and Ferguson Foundation is responsible for erecting plaques throughout New Orleans commemorating African American historic sites and civil rights leaders. This episode also delves into the story of one of these markers commemorating the integration of the McDonogh 19 Elementary School by three 6 year old African American girls in 1960.

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