New/not so new favorite shows on KQED-San Francisco. “Finding Your Roots” with Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. The last episode that Elizabeth and I watched featured:

–Christopher Walken, whose father owned a bakery in Astoria, NY. Researchers found his grandfather’s bakery in Germany, captured in a 1912 photo. Walken’s father was an extraordinary man, I think. He immigrated from Germany in 1928, married a beautiful woman and started the bakery when the stock market crashed. “He just figured the Depression leveled the playing field for everybody,” Walken said. The bakery was in business for sixty years.



–Fred Armisen [“Portlandia”], who thought himself 1/4 Japanese and therefore loves Japanese food.. Nope.* Armisens’s grandfather, a dancer who had a brief fling with a German woman that eventually led to Fred, was Korean. And he was a part-time German spy on the side. The grandfather, Kuni, only studied in Japan, but he was such a gifted and influential dancer that a museum is dedicated to him there.


*[My Dad thought his family was Scots. Nope. They were from the coal-dusty English Midlands, not far from Bosworth, where Richard III got himself massacred. When they found the little fellow’s skeleton beneath a parking lot a few years ago, there was a deep postmortem puncture wound in his arse. Despite that indignity, Richard, remains, I think, Shakespeare’s greatest villain.]

The thoroughly dead Richard III

–Carly Simon, who loved her grandmother but knew almost nothing about her. DNA testing showed that her grandmother was the descendant of Cuban slaves, and that Carly’s ancestry is 10% African. “You’re the blackest white person we’ve ever tested,” Gates deadpanned. There’s some kind of justice there, I think. The Simon family was very close to an African-American couple who moved into their neighborhood: Jackie and Rachel Robinson.

Rachel Robinson embraces the late Chadwick Boseman, who played her husband in 42.
Armisen, Simon, Walken


“Check, Please, Bay Area.” Incredible visuals that make your mouth water. My favorite recent show featured reviews from these three adorable kids who reviewed Japanese, Italian and Burmese restaurants. They were incredibly articulate and they gave the desserts at all three places the attention that they deserved. Yum.

I don’t know. All that “melting pot” stuff kind of rocks. Here’s the “Check Please” episode with the kids. They are delightful. More Melting Pot: The Italian-American girl is an Irish step dancer.