On Demand
Survival Kit Archive
October 2002
Ruth Reichl
Sunday, October 27, 2002
Ruth Reichl has always seen the world in terms of f¿her two memoirs, Tender at the Bone and Comfort Me With Apples, the important events and people in her life are always defined by the meals that accompanied them. And she transformed the art of restaurant reviewing, in her decades at the New York Times and the L.A. Times, by emphasizing the whole dining experience, not just individual dishes. Let’s find out what the editor-in-chief of Gourmet Magazine is packing in her Survival Kit, or perhaps I should say “Survival picnic basket”.
Julia Stiles
Sunday, October 20, 2002
Julia Stiles has probably not spent very much time alone in her life. She grew up in a Soho loft with not only her parents, brother and sister, but also her parents' busy pottery business. At the age of 11, she joined the LaMama experimental theater troupe. Recently a dorm at Columbia University has been her home, at least when she's not on a movie set, starring in films like Save the Last Dance, Hamlet, O, 10 Things I Hate About You, The Business of Strangers, State and Main and The Bourne Identity. Her idea of a retreat has been to go to Costa Rica with Habitat for Humanity to build houses for people there. Let's see what she's put in her Survival Kit for a period of enforced isolation.
Oscar Hijuelos
Sunday, October 13, 2002
Oscar Hijuelos was born in New York City, and still lives there, just a few blocks from where he grew up. But if his novels are any clue, at least a piece of his heart resides in his ancestral land of Cuba.The author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, A Simple Habana Melody, The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien, and other novels has explored the Cuban-American experience in exquisitely detailed prose. Let’s see what he’s packed in his survival kit for a sojourn far from his beloved cities of Havana and New York.
Margaret Cho
Friday, October 04, 2002
Margaret Cho spent much of her childhood in her parents' bookstore in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco, before beginning her career as a stand-up comic, and she likes to say that instead of being raised by wolves, she "was raised by drag queens." In the mid-1990's, she starred in the first Asian-American sitcom, All-American Girl, and followed that up with two popular solo shows, I'm The One That I Want and Notorious C.H.O., which have also been made into films, books and CDs. In an attempt to fill in the gaps in her education, we're sending her out to wolf country; let's ask her what she's packing in her survival kit.
