and invite an enemy soldier to join in their picnic. After wine and lacklustre conversation they start enthusiastically dancing to the pasodoble to the music of the phonograph they've brought with them. They are all killed by machine-gun fire. Levy recounts 'The shocked audience sits watching stretcher-bearers remove the bodies, listening to a stuck phonograph needle repeat the pasodoble tune'. No Picnic on Mount Kenya: The Story of Three P.O.W.s' Escape to Adventure (1946), by Felice Benuzzi, is the true story of three Italian prisoners of war who, faced with years of tedium in a detention camp, decide to break out in order to climb Africa's second-highest mountain. "No expedition on the mountain was ever a picnic" Vivienne de Watteville had written in her book Speak to the Earth (1935) about her 1929 visit to Mount Kenya. Benuzzi's English title, perhaps suggested by this line of de Watteville's, refers to the expression 'It was no picnic', meaning 'It was hard going', but with an ironic allusion to the climbers' meagre P.O.W. rations. The novel Roadside Picnic (1972) by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, was the source for the film Stalker (1979) by Andrei Tarkovsky. The novel is about a mysterious 'zone' filled with strange and often deadly extraterrestrial artefacts, which are theorized by some scientists to be the refuse from an alien "picnic" on Earth. Music In 1906, the American composer John Walter Bratton wrote a musical piece originally titled "The Teddy Bear Two Step". It became popular in a 1908 instrumental version renamed 'Teddy Bears' Picnic', performed by the Arthur Pryor Band. The song regained prominence in 1932 when the Irish lyricist Jimmy Kennedy added words and it was recorded by the then popular Henry Hall (and his BBC Dance Orchestra) featuring Val Rosing (Gilbert Russell) as lead vocalist, which went on to sell a million copies. 'The Teddy Bears' Picnic' resurfaced again in the late 1940s and early 1950s when it was used as the theme song for the Big Jon and Sparkie children's radio show. This perennial favorite has appeared on many children's recordings ever since, and is the theme song for the AHL's Hershey Bears hockey club. lyrics and audio from the BBC 'Stoned Soul Picnic', by Laura Nyro (released in 1968), was also a major hit for the group The 5th Dimension. Roxette's 1996 song 'June Afternoon' depicts images of people having fun and eating on