Birthday's Today

It's the birthday of chef and author Alice Waters (books by this author), born in Chatham, New Jersey (1944). She was 27 years old with no restaurant experience when she opened Chez Panisse, her Berkeley restaurant centered on fresh, local ingredients. She wanted to create food like that she had experienced in France, where friends sat down together for long meals prepared by generous hosts. But at first, she was a little too generous — in the first year of its operation, Chez Panisse gave away $30,000 worth of wine to guests and staff.

Waters has written 11 books, including her most recent, In the Green Kitchen: Techniques to Learn by Heart (2007). She wrote: "Our full humanity is contingent on our hospitality; we can be complete only when we are giving something away; when we sit at the table and pass the peas to the person next to us we see that person in a whole new way."

It's the birthday of playwright Robert Anderson, born in New York City (1917). His father, a business executive, was a distant man, and sent his son off to boarding school at Phillips Exeter Academy. Anderson was lonely there, and he fell in love with an older woman. He went to Harvard, fought in the Navy, and then started writing plays.

He thought back to his time at Exeter, and he wrote a play about a lonely and sensitive young man named Tom at an all-boys boarding school. Tom's classmates decide that he is gay and make his life miserable. His one friend is Laura, the wife of a faculty member, who is supposed to offer him tea and sympathy but ends up sleeping with Tom. The play was called Tea and Sympathy (1953), and it was a big hit on Broadway, and then turned into a popular film.

Anderson's other plays include You Know I Can't Hear You When the Water's Running (1967) and I Never Sang for My Father (1968).

He said: "The mission of the playwright is to look in his heart and write, to write whatever concerns him at the moment; to write with passion and conviction. Of course the measure of the man will be the measure of the play."