The Kitchen Sisters Present

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.

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.

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.

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

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. \

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.

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.

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.

Arctic Ice, Extreme Weather, the Reckoning at Standing Rock—a journey into the deep rich world of photographer Camille Seaman. Born to a Native American father and African-American mother, Camille Seaman has been bearing witness and sounding the alarm through her powerful, other worldly photographs for more than 20 years. Her photographs and vivid stories document her journeys to the Arctic and Antarctic over the past two decades, her work as a storm chaser in the midwest, her documentation of the Standing Rock water protectors, and her ongoing project “We Are Still Here,” photographing Indigenous people around the country, in all walks of life, along with messages to their future ancestors. Camille was raised by her Shinnecock grandparents in Long Island and inspired by her grandfather’s teachings about our interrelatedness with nature. She attended the “Fame” High School of Music and Performing Arts in New York City, living from couch to couch, working as a bicycle message and a one-hour photo lab operator.  Her award winning photographs have been published in National Geographic, Time, Newsweek and the New York Times Sunday Magazine. She is a TED Senior Fellow and a Stanford Knight Fellow, and she was honored with a one person exhibition, "The Last Iceberg" at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington D.C. The Kitchen Sisters interviewed Camille Seaman as part of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music’s 2021 Season. Her imagery was featured at the Festival as part of a piece entitled MELT, a lament on climate change with music composed by Sean Shepherd.

Julia Morgan, the first woman architect to be licensed in California, designed over 700 buildings in California including Hearst Castle in San Simeon. Despite her prolific career her architectural genius was overlooked by history for almost 100 years before she posthumously earned the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal. Morgan was the first woman to be admitted to the architecture program at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. She designed many buildings serving women and girls, including a number of YWCAs, Women’s Clubs and buildings for Mills College. She pioneered the use of reinforced concrete in many of her buildings, a material that proved to have superior seismic performance in the 1906 and 1989 earthquakes. Julia Morgan’s almost forgotten story has been lovingly researched and passed down over the years by a remarkable linage of “Keepers” and is chronicled in “Finding Julia Morgan,” the pilot episode of New Angle: Voice, a podcast about the lives and careers of pioneering Women in Architecture. Produced by Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, directed by Cynthia Phifer Kracauer, AIA, and radio producer Brandi Howell.