The Kitchen Sisters Present

Just about anytime we walk out of The Kitchen Sisters office in San Francisco we stop and stare in the windows of City Lights bookstore, soaking in the covers of the new arrivals. A while back, we were stopped in our tracks by a book of photographs of Patti Smith – Patti staring down the camera, holding a movie camera herself. It turns out Patti wasn’t just the muse of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the Sixties, she was also muse and model for Judy Linn, an art student and budding photographer in New York.

Paging through Patti Smith 1969-1976, we discovered Judy had that not only photographed Patti, she had made a super-8 movie too, as the two young women created a world together. The movies were missing, but the soundtracks remained. Lost and found sound, we thought. Got to hear those recordings, got to meet that photographer. And we did. 

The story of three pioneering river activists and the damming of wild rivers in the west. Ken Sleight, now in his late 80s, is a long time river and pack guide in southern Utah who fought the damming of Glen Canyon and filling of Lake Powell. The inspiration for Ed Abbey’s character Seldom Seen Smith in his book The Monkey Wrench Gang, Sleight is currently working on the campaign to remove Glen Canyon dam.

Katie Lee, born 1919, a former Hollywood starlet, ran the Colorado through Glen Canyon long before it was dammed and in 1955 was the 175th person to run the Grand Canyon. An outspoken conservationist, singer and writer, she has spent her life fighting for rivers.

Mark Dubois, co-founder of Friends of the River, Earth Day and International Rivers Network, began as a river guide who opened up rafting trips to disabled people in the 1970s. Dubois protested the damming and flooding of the Stanislaus River by chaining himself to a rock in the river as the water rose.

The Kitchen Sisters ride the nightshift with The Homobile. Homobiles is a non-commercial, volunteer, 24/7 ride service created by Lynne Breedlove for the LGBTQ+ community and others around San Francisco who feel the need for safe, dependable rides, outside traditional services. “Moes getting hoes where they needs to goes,” is their motto. Homobiles is for people who feel at risk because they don’t conform to sexual or gender norms and have been targets of rudeness or shame or violence, says Lynne. Homobiles is a network of independent drivers who pilot their own cars, a non-profit organization that caters to this underserved, and sometimes harassed community in the Bay Area. This community car service operates on donations. No one is turned away for lack of funds. Homobiles has been called “Uber for Drag Queens,” but with a mission that is social, not financial.

Shirley Temple died on February 10. 2014. Watching the parade of clips from her 1930s movies on TV that night brought back the magic she had as a child to delight and entertain. How many hours did we spend watching her tap her way through hard times and good?

It was actually Shirley Temple who triggered the story you’re about to hear. The year was 1999. I had been getting manicures for awhile at a Vietnamese nail shop in San Francisco from a woman named Shirley. Over the months I had come to know her a bit, she would ask about our radio shows, I would ask about her daughter Crystal. One day as we talked it occurred to me, why is this woman named Shirley? She is from Vietnam. There are no Shirley’s there.

When I asked how she came to be Shirley she told the most harrowing story of her passage to America as a young girl, her separation from her brother and mother as they escaped Vietnam by boat, how she washed ashore in America alone, sick and scared out of her mind, speaking no English.

She said in Vietnam her name was Hang, which means ‘Lonely woman looking at the moon.” Hang was hospitalized. In the hospital room she watched the black and white TV on the wall. Over and over she saw a little girl dancing, who was happy. She told herself she had to stop crying for her mother and brother. She was in America. She had to be happy too. Someone told her the little girl’s name was Shirley, Shirley Temple. So she took that name.

Shirley led us into her world. We spent months in Vietnamese nail salons, chronicling the lives of the women working there. Today we call this story “French Manicure: The Long Shadow of Shirley Temple”

Listen…..

The Kitchen Sisters  take us to a little-known, hidden corner of London — to Eel Pie Island, a tiny slice of land in the middle of the Thames. Now a small bohemian community of artists, inventors, river gypsies and boat builders, on the edge of Twickenham, Eel Pie Island has a flamboyant history that stretches from Henry VIII to The Rolling Stones.

Eel Pie Island is produced by The Kitchen Sisters with Nathan Dalton, mixed by Jim McKee / The Hidden World of Kate McGarrigle, produced by the Kitchen Sisters

Fugitive Waves is produced by The Kitchen Sisters in collaboration with Tom Corwin

In 1947 Tennessee Williams and his lover Pancho stepped into a recording booth at a penny arcade in New Orleans and recorded 8 cardboard discs. Lost in a trunk under a friends bed for some 50 years, The Kitchen Sisters unearth these forgotten Pennyland Recordings and tell the story of Tennessee’s fugitive waves.

Fugitive Waves is produced by The Kitchen Sisters in collaboration with Tom Corwin and mixed by Jim McKee

Look around your daily life. There’s a little piece of Thomas Edison almost everywhere.  Your desk lamp. That x-ray you got when you broke your arm. The battery in your car. The movie you saw last night. The recording of this story that you’re about to hear…  Welcome to Fugitive Waves. Today, a story from our Lost & Found Sound series on NPR, The Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall and Rise of Thomas Alva Edison.  

Fugitive Waves is produced by The Kitchen Sisters in collaboration with Tom Corwin and mixed by Jim McKee