The Kitchen Sisters Present Radiotopia

San Francisco officially declared July 15th Linda Ronstadt Day. In her honor, The Kitchen Sisters Present this story about her book, Feels Like Home, about her family, and the food, culture and music of the borderland of Arizona and Mexico where she is rooted.  Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands is an historical, musical, edible memoir that spans the story of five generations of Linda’s Mexican American German family, from the Sonoran desert in Mexico to the Ronstadt family hardware store in Tucson to the road that led Linda to LA and musical stardom. Intimate and epic, "this is little Linda, Mexican Linda, cowgirl Linda, desert Linda."The book, written in collaboration with New York Times writer Lawrence Downes, is a road trip through the Sonoran Borderlands, from Tucson to Banámichi, Mexico — the path Linda’s immigrant grandfather took at a time when the border was not a place of peril but of possibility.We went to see Linda at home to ask her about the journey.This story was produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva) and Evan Jacoby in collaboration with Brandi Howell and Nathan Dalton. Mixed by Jim McKeeThanks to Lawrence Downes, John Boylan, Bill Steen, Janet Stark and The PRX Podcast Garage. And to the team at Heyday Books: Steve Wasserman, Kalie Caetano & Megan Beatie and to Putamayo Music who just released Feels Like Home: Songs From The Sonoran Borderlands, Linda Ronstadt’s Musical Odyssey.Special thanks to Linda Ronstadt for opening her home and her vault to this story.

Route 66—The Main Street of America— the first continuously paved highway linking east and west was the most traveled and well known road in the US for almost fifty years. From Chicago, through the Ozarks, across Oklahoma, the Texas Panhandle, up the mesas of New Mexico and Arizona, and down into California to the Pacific Ocean. The first road of its kind, it came to represent America’s mobility and freedom—inspiring countless stories, songs, and even a TV show.Songwriter Bobby Troup tells the story of his 1946 hit “Get Your Kicks on Route 66.” Mickey Mantle says, “If it hadn’t been for US 66 I wouldn’t have been a Yankee.” Stirling Silliphant, creator of the TV series “Route 66” talks about the program and its place in American folklore of the 60s.Studs Terkel reads from The Grapes of Wrath about the "Mother Road," and the great 1930s migration along Highway 66. We hear from musicians who recall what life on the road during the 1930s was like for them, including Clarence Love, Woody Guthrie, and Eldin Shamblin, who played guitar for Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys.We travel the history of the road from its beginnings through caverns and roadside attractions, into tourist traps and bunko joints, through the hard times of the Dust Bowl, Depression and the “Road of Flight,” and into the “Ghost Road” of the 1980s, as the interstates bypass the businesses and roadside attractions of another era.Produced by The Kitchen Sisters and narrated by actor David Selby. The Kitchen Sisters Present is produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Nikki Silva & Davia Nelson) with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell. Part of Radiotopia from PRX, a curated network of podcasts created by independent producers.

In 1977, a cavernous, rarely used sculpture gallery in the Brooklyn Museum was filled with drafting tables, their tops tilted to display collages of the work and under-told stories of women working in architecture in the United States.We revisit this first significant effort to publicly tell the little known stories of American women in architecture: “Women in American Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective.” On view at the Brooklyn Museum from February-April of 1977, the groundbreaking exhibition and simultaneous book, curated and edited by Susana Torre, clearly defined the state of play for women in the architecture profession. Alienated by the profound hostility expressed by the AIA, women architects came together and found an accepting cohort at the Architectural League of New York. They organized. They canvassed. They raised their consciousnesses. The project team identified subjects so previously obscured as to be unknown, and then with the energy and drive of a furious mob, they broke through and laid the groundwork for scholarship, social change, and recognition of women architects for the next fifty years.  Produced by Brandi Howell, for the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation's podcast New Angle Voice.Special thanks to Susana Torre, Andrea Merrett, Suzanne Stephens, Cynthia Rock, Deborah Nevins, and Robert AM Stern. Editorial advising from Alexandra Lange and production assistance from Virginia Eskridge and Aislinn McNamara. Funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Graham Foundation.The Kitchen Sisters Present, part of PRX's Radiotopia network, is produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Nikki Silva & Davia Nelson) with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell. For more stories and information visit kitchensisters.org. 

As this year's hurricane season ramps up, 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 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, permeated with man made canals, levees, pumping stations …. Water is a deep and controversial issue in New Orleans. What to do with it? Where to put it? How to get rid of it? How to live with it?David Waggonner, of Waggonner & Ball architecture and environment firm has been thinking and dreaming about these questions for years. One of the primary architects behind the Greater New Orleans Urban Water Plan, David envisions floating streets, pervious pavement, planting bioswales—“living with water” rather than pushing it down and pumping it out.In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina the Sisters of Saint Joseph convent in New Orleans was under eight feet of water. A year later, on a clear blue day, the building was struck by lightning. The Sisters prayed for a sign. And in walked David Waggonner with a vision.The Mirabeau Water Garden will become one of the largest urban wetlands in the country and a campus for water research and environmental education, demonstrating best practices for construction and urban water management in the city's lowest-lying and most vulnerable neighborhoods.The 25-acre parcel was donated to the City of New Orleans by the Sisters of Saint Joseph on condition that it be used to enhance and protect the neighborhood to “evoke a huge systemic shift in the way humans relate with water and land.”Produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Nikki Silva & Davia Nelson) with Nathan Dalton & Brandi Howell. For more stories and information visit kitchensisters.org

On February 16, 2024 Russian dissident Alexei Navalny died under unexplained circumstances in a penal colony in the Russian Arctic just weeks before the election that enthroned Vladimir Putin for another six years of near-absolute power. Within days of Navalny’s death his wife Yulia Navalnaya rose up, spoke out and vowed to continue her husband’s struggle. A decade ago The Kitchen Sisters were in Moscow reporting for our NPR series Hidden Kitchens: War and Peace and Food. We were at lunch with writer, television journalist and government critic, Victor Erofeyev and asked what his hidden kitchen was. “Dissident Kitchens,” he said. “The Soviet Union fell apart because of the kitchen.” We started digging. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, millions of people poured into Moscow from the countryside, many living crammed together in the appropriated grand apartments of the wealthy — a single, communal kitchen shared by the ten or so families squeezed together under one roof. Spaces were crowded, food scarce, privacy nonexistent. After Stalin’s death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev came to power. His new Soviet government built hundreds of huge standardized apartment buildings with single family units, each with their own kitchen. These new, private kitchens became hotbeds of politics, forbidden music, literature – "dissident kitchens" where the seeds of ending the Soviet Union were sewn. Just as Victor Erofeyev told us over lunch. Today, in honor of Alexei Navalny and in honor of Victor Erofeyev, who fled Russia with his family after the invasion of Ukraine, The Kitchen Sisters Present: Dissident Kitchens.

On April 12, 2024, Eleanor Coppola, artist, filmmaker, mother and wife of director Francis Ford Coppola, died at her home in the Napa Valley surrounded by family. She was 87 years old and had lived a most remarkable life.Shortly before her death, Eleanor had completed her third memoir. In it she wrote:“I appreciate how my unexpected life has stretched and pulled me in so many extraordinary ways and taken me in a multitude of directions beyond my wildest imaginings.”On May 6, 2008, on the occasion of the release of her second memoir, Notes on a Life, Eleanor and Davia sat down together at The Commonwealth Club of California and had this conversation before a live audience.Our thanks to The Commonwealth Club of California for sharing this 2008 recording. This conversation was part of their Good Lit Series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation.The Kitchen Sisters' San Francisco studio is located in Francis and Eleanor's Zoetrope building in North Beach. Ellie has been a part of our lives since the day we came here some three decades ago. Our love goes to the many generations of the Coppola family.