The women who were murdered in Atlanta were Korean, not Vietnamese. They were doing massage, not manicures. But they faced the hate and violence that is mounting against Asian American people in the United States. We produced this story in 2000 as part of the Lost & Found Sound series on NPR. We presented it again as Vietnamese and other manicurists were losing their jobs and livelihoods during the pandemic. Today, we offer it again in honor of Asian American women wherever they live, whatev...
Mar 23, 2021•23 min
The impact of Shonen Knife, the 1980s all-girl punk band from Osaka—a story of cultural exchange through the cassette tape. Shonen Knife, the three-woman band from Japan, formed in 1981—a time just before the internet drastically changed the way we consume and discover music. A time when a cassette tape, alongside fanzines and college radio created an environment that made possible the seemingly improbable circumstance of an all girl-band from Osaka opening for Nirvana, one of the biggest musica...
Mar 09, 2021•29 min
It’s February 23, 2021— and we’ve just received word that our dear friend and North Beach neighbor, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, has passed on at age 101. In honor of Lawrence we’re sharing a story we produced for his 99th birthday, featuring the work of sound designer Jim McKee who, for more than 20 years, recorded and chronicled Lawrence’s life, poetry and world. In this lushly produced soundscape, Lawrence talks about his youth, reads his poetry, and muses with his friend Erik Bauersfeld about life...
Feb 24, 2021•23 min
Stories of Black pioneers, seekers and entrepreneurs — self-made men and self-taught women, neighborhood heroes and visionaries. People who said "yes we can" and then did, hosted by Alfre Woodard. A man tapes the history of his town with a scavenged cassette recorder, a woman fights for social justice with a pie, a DJ ignites his community with a sound. Stories of Georgia Gilmore and the Club from Nowhere, a Secret Civil Rights Kitchen; of Hercules and of James Hemings, enslaved chefs of George ...
Feb 23, 2021•54 min
Sometimes you read a book and it alters the course of your life. That’s what happened to Frances McDormand. Twice. First it was Olive Kitteridge, the HBO series she produced and starred in based on the book by Elizabeth Stroud. This time it's Nomadland. Academy Award winning Frances McDormand talks about the making of Nomadland which is coming to Hulu and select theaters and drive-ins starting February 19, 2021. Directed by Chloe Zhao, based on the nonfiction book Nomadland: Surviving in the Twe...
Feb 09, 2021•27 min
Music and poetry were powerful headliners at the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris signaling change and new beginnings. This was not the first time the arts have reflected 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 m...
Jan 26, 2021•35 min
A mushroom farmer, food activist, business entrepreneur, foster mother to more than a dozen girls—Chido Govera is a kitchen visionary in Zimbabwe—a pioneer in the cultivation of mushrooms throughout Africa and the world. Chido was orphaned at 7 when her mother died of AIDS. As a girl, who never had enough to eat, she began cultivating mushrooms when she was nine. Some people look at a mushroom and see a mushroom. Chido looked at a mushroom and saw a weapon for social change, a path out of hunger...
Jan 12, 2021•25 min
It was Friday, April 10th, 2020. The pandemic was really starting to roar. PPE was scarce and the supply chains were already breaking down. Every hospital was scrambling to find enough masks, gowns and face shields. It was already every state, every institution for itself. It was everywhere in the papers. Page 1, Page 2, Page 3. On Page 9 of the New York Times, dateline: Sugarcreek, Ohio, a headline caught our eye: “Abe Make a Sewing Frolic” — In Ohio The Amish Take on the Coronavirus. This isol...
Dec 22, 2020•19 min
Frances McDormand talks about her extraordinary new film— Nomadland directed by Chloe Zhao, based on the nonfiction book Nomadland: Surviving in the Twenty First Century by Jessica Bruder. A tale for our times. The story centers on the very “now” many Americans find themselves in. People uprooted from their old jobs and old neighborhoods, places they've called home for decades, now living in DIY customized vans, migrating for work with the seasons. Christmas near the Amazon Fulfillment Center in...
Dec 08, 2020•27 min
With all of us thinking of home and family and of all the things we love and miss, we thought we’d spend some time with Angelo Garro – a Sicilian blacksmith living in a forge in San Francisco with a passion for hunting, foraging, opera, cooking, pickling, curing salamis, making wine and generously tending and feeding his friends and community. A Thanksgiving gift. The Kitchen Sisters join Angelo along the coast of Northern California as he follows the seasons foraging fennel in the spring, wild ...
Nov 24, 2020•16 min
In 1966, a young Marine took a reel-to-reel tape recorder with him into the Vietnam War. For two months, Michael A. Baronowski made tapes of his life and his friends, in foxholes, in combat and sent those audio letters home to his family in Norristown, Pennsylvania. Then he was killed in action. Thirty-four years later, Baronowski’s friend Tim Duffie, shared these tapes which were used to produce this story as part of the NPR series, “Lost & Found Sound,” created by Jay Allison and The Kitch...
Nov 10, 2020•27 min
For Winona LaDuke the best part of running for Vice President in 1996 and 2000 on the Green Party ticket with Ralph Nadar was meeting so many people who really want to see a democracy that works—who really want to vote for someone they believe in. At rallies women would bring their daughters up to Winona saying, ‘We want them to grow up and be like you.’ Ojibwe leader, writer, food activist, rural development economist, environmentalist, Harvard graduate—Winona, which means first born daughter, ...
Oct 27, 2020•26 min
Sometimes we find the story, sometimes the story finds us. Such is the case with this tale of two Keepers from the Pacific Northwest, the official/unofficial archivists for Pearl Jam . Caroline Losneck, a radio producer in Maine heard our Keepers series about activist archivists and rogue librarians and said to herself, “Hey wait a minute, what about that mythic vault in Seattle I’ve been hearing about for years filled to the brim with 30 years of Pearl Jam, who's keeping that?” We are especiall...
Oct 13, 2020•25 min
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 forward 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, pe...
Sep 22, 2020•19 min
The Peabody Award winning Sonic Memorial Project, an intimate and historic documentary commemorating the life and history of the World Trade Center and its surrounding neighborhood, through audio artifacts, rare recordings, voicemail messages and interviews. The Sonic Memorial Project began in October 2001 as part of the Lost & Found Sound series. We came together—radio producers, artists, construction workers, bond traders, secretaries, ironworkers, elevator operators, policemen, widows, fi...
Sep 08, 2020•1 hr 3 min
Picture this: 131 young people, 13 to 26 years old, from 37 countries—youth activists from around the globe— students, writers, poets, marchers, community leaders all gathered together in San Juan, Puerto Rico in August 2019, the week after the scandal-ridden government of Governor Ricardo Rosselló fell. A government brought down in large measure because of the resolve and activism of young people across the Hurricane Maria-battered island. This wasn’t part of the plan for the second meeting of ...
Aug 25, 2020•41 min
On Tuesday August 4th, a massive explosion devastated Beirut, shattering the port and the heart of the city. Over 150 people have lost their lives, some 5000 people have been injured, hundreds of thousands have lost their homes — all while the people of Lebanon are facing catastrophic levels of the coronavirus and devastating economic collapse. Our love and our sorrow are with the people of Beirut. In 2015 Davia traveled to Lebanon for our Hidden Kitchens series to chronicle the work of the Leba...
Aug 11, 2020•27 min
In honor of the many people who work in nail salons across the country who are struggling to keep their businesses from going under during these long closures, The Kitchen Sisters Present French Manicure —Tales from Vietnamese Nail Shops in America, a story produced as part of the Lost and Found Sound series on NPR. Currently it is estimated that more than 40% of the nail salon technicians in America are Vietnamese women. In California the numbers are estimated at more than 75%. The majority of ...
Jul 28, 2020•25 min
Louis Jones, Field Archivist, is a Keeper. For 27 years he has worked building and caring for the largest labor archive in North America—the Reuther Library at Wayne State University in Detroit. Home to numerous union and labor collections from around the country, the Reuther Library also actively collects material documenting Detroit’s civil rights movement, women’s struggles in the workplace, the LGBTQ Archive of Detroit and more. Born in New York City, the grandson of a Pullman porter, Louis ...
Jul 14, 2020•23 min
In 1985, Gert McMullin was one of the first San Franciscans to put a stitch on the AIDS Quilt, the quilt that began with one memorial square in honor of a man who had died of AIDS, and that now holds some 95,000 names. Gert never planned it this way, but over the decades she has become the Keeper of the Quilt and has stewarded it, repaired it, tended it, traveled with it and conserved it for some 33 years now. Gert knows the power of sewing. In 2020, when COVID-19 hit, Gert was one of the first ...
Jun 19, 2020•32 min
November 14, 1960, New Orleans. Three six-year-old girls, flanked by Federal Marshals, walked through screaming crowds and policemen on horseback as they approached their new school for the first time—McDonogh No. 19. Leona Tate thought it must be Mardi Gras. Gail Etienne thought they were going to kill her. 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 ...
Jun 09, 2020•18 min
Eel Pie Island, a tiny bit of land in the River Thames has a flamboyant history involving King Henry VIII, Charles Dickens, The Rolling Stones, Pete Townshend, Rod Stewart, Anjelica Huston, Trad Jazz, Rock and Roll… and eel pie—a disappearing London delicacy. The story goes that Henry VIII in the 16th century would be rowed up the Thames on the Royal Barge and would stop at the island for an eel pie. Charles Dickens immortalized it in his novel Nicholas Nickleby. In the 1950s a jazz club was sta...
May 26, 2020•23 min
An intimate, inspiring, hopeful conversation with Mexican chef and cookbook author, Pati Jinich, host of the James Beard Award winning PBS series Pati's Mexican Table and resident chef at the Mexican Cultural Institute in Washington D.C. On a walk through Oaxaca's Enthnobotanical Garden, Pati tells stories of her Jewish grandparents immigration to Mexico during WWII, her upbringing in Mexico and her move to Texas and Washington D.C. as a young mother. She shares her thoughts on immigration, The ...
May 12, 2020•19 min
Al Gore is back and he’s got a new slide show. Better take heed. Last October the former Vice President, Nobel Prize-winner and Academy Award-winner for An Inconvenient Truth, together with activist, restaurateur, and founder of The Edible Schoolyard, Alice Waters, gathered farmers, ranchers, scientists, chefs, researchers, policymakers on Al's family farm in Carthage, Tennessee for a riveting set of conversations about the role of food and regenerative agriculture in solving the climate crisis....
Apr 17, 2020•30 min
April 1993: A small village in Sicily prepares for the first visit of 78-year-old baseball legend Joe DiMaggio to the town where his parents were born and raised. Fishermen, artisans, grandmothers — some 3,000 villagers brush up on The Yankee and Marilyn Monroe. Italian and American flags are strung from the buildings, two thousand baseballs are purchased for Joltin’ Joe to autograph. A feast of sea urchins, calamari, pasta sarda and marzipan is cooked in his honor. Nearly the entire annual budg...
Apr 14, 2020•31 min
The Keepers, from The Kitchen Sisters and PRX with host, Academy Award-winning actress Frances McDormand. Stories of activist archivists, rogue librarians, curators, collectors and historians. Guardians of history, large and small. Protectors of the free flow of information and ideas. Keepers of the culture and the culture and collections they keep. In this hour, Bob Dylan’s Archive, Henri Langlois’ legendary Cinémathéque in Paris, The Keeper of the National Archives, Nancy Pearl: the first libr...
Mar 24, 2020•55 min
The Keepers, from The Kitchen Sisters and PRX with host, Academy Award-winning actress, Frances McDormand. Stories of activist archivists, rogue librarians, curators, collectors and historians. Guardians of history, large and small. Protectors of the free flow of information and ideas. Keepers of the culture and the culture and collections they keep. In this hour, stories of the Hiphop Archive at Harvard, the Pack Horse Librarians of Eastern Kentucky, the Lenny Bruce Archive, the Internet Archiv...
Mar 10, 2020•54 min
Lou Reed—music icon, poet, photographer, Tai Chi master, vital force in the cultural life and underworld of New York City. Lou died in 2013 and left not a word of instruction about what he wanted done with his archive of recordings, instruments, gear, his Tai Chi swords, jackets—from his days with The Velvet Underground, through his solo career and last recordings. He left everything to his wife, artist and musician Laurie Anderson. Over the next six years Laurie and a team of Lou’s “keepers” cr...
Feb 25, 2020•31 min
In celebration of truckers everywhere and of Radiotopia’s new show Over the Road, The Kitchen Sisters visit some of their favorite Texas pitstops. First up — a truck stop in Carl’s Corner, Texas off I 35 between Dallas and Austin where Willie Nelson first introduced his BioWillie fuel in 2004. Willie’s friend, Carl Cornelius, founded Carl’s Corner in the early 1980s in order to sell liquor in a mostly dry county. He opened up a truck stop —a trucker’s haven and tourist attraction —with hot tubs,...
Feb 11, 2020•20 min
When Sam Phillips sold Elvis’ contract in 1955 he used the money to start an all-girl radio station in Memphis, TN. Set in a pink, plush studio in the nation’s third Holiday Inn, it was a novelty—but not for long. He hired models, beauty queens, actresses, telephone operators. Some were young mothers who just needed a job. WHER was the first radio station to feature women as more than novelties and sidekicks. The WHER girls were broadcasting pioneers. Set against the backdrop of the civil rights...
Jan 28, 2020•40 min
