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The request was forwarded to me from a distant (fifth floor — I'm on four) division of NPR.

It came from Justin Lucas, the head of NPR's Audience and Community Relations team. He's the go-to person here for requests from listeners, for information or permissions.

He'd gotten a letter from Beth Hansen, owner of Soup and Salad, a small sandwich shop in Easton, Md., a charming old town on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay.

Justin read me an excerpt of the request: "I'd love to make and sell Mama Stamberg's Cranberry Chutney. A portion of the proceeds..."

"Wait, she says chutney?" I ask.

"Yes, she says chutney."

Susan Stamberg's Cranberry Relish Tradition

Mrs. Stamberg's Relish Goes To Washington

"It's a relish," I correct.

"Fair point," says Lucas. Anyway, "a portion of the proceeds will go to either NPR or our local NPR station. Please let me know the terms under which you would allow this. Thank you very much."

Well, this is too much!

Beth Hansen is writing about a recipe, which I have read on NPR for the past 127 years: a venerable Thanksgiving recipe from my late mother-in-law for a tart relish with cranberries, sour cream, sugar, onion and horseradish — a recipe which sounds terrible, but tastes terrific (even though it does end up the color of Pepto Bismol).

Anyway, Justin says, I'm the one to give permission. So I call her.

Hansen tells me there are lots of NPR listeners in Delmarva (where Delaware, Maryland and Virginia make a pretty peninsula) who are curious about the recipe, but don't want to actually make it. She figures if she makes it, they'll want to try it.

"So can we do it?" she asks.

"Well," I say, "I'm kinda picky about that recipe. I mean, Americans can make it when I do it on the radio, but ... you're not very far from where I am in Washington, D.C. I think I'd need to come and inspect your sandwich shop and see the kind of operation you've got."

Beth Hansen's sign for Susan Stamberg when she visited the Amish Farmers Market. Jackie Judd/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Jackie Judd/NPR

"That would be fabulous!" says Beth.

She explains how to get to her food stand in the Amish Farmer's Market.

"You were asking what our terms might be," I say. "You know we have no terms, to tell you the truth, Miss Hansen. But this inspection will be very important — just to make sure it's the proper venue."

It turned out it was the weekend of the Waterfowl Festival in Easton, a lively celebration of hunting season in Delmarva. But the only geese we see in town are carved in plastic, and bleep from a boombox, hidden behind some bales of hay.

Now, like you, I have attitudes about hunting. And guns. I like big dogs and decoys and not great paintings of ducks and geese and sunny streets full of families and food stalls.

But I need to go out of town a bit, to find the would-be cranberry lady.

I was expecting some outside tents and little tables set up under it, but that's not what I found.

The Amish Country Farmers Market is supermarket-size and immaculate, with vendors in straw hats, long beards, the women in simple dresses and tidy white caps, selling everything from chicken breasts and salad dressing to knitted mittens and handmade furniture.

There are lots of eating areas all around with tables and chairs. At 9 a.m., there's quite a line at the all-you-can-eat $7 breakfast buffet.

Delmarva native Mark Weaver is fixing himself a plate. "I started with the potatoes. You gotta have your starch. And then my scrapple. Then, after that, we're gonna get a little bit of bacon," he says. "I'll grab a biscuit and I'll make a little biscuits and gravy."

At this point I am in need of Beth Hansen's Soup and Salad. Where is she? I stroll the aisles, searching.

I spot a sign: "Welcome Susan Stamberg of NPR, the relish is back here."

And there's the food stand. Beth is tall and smiling, gray hair, and friendly, if a bit nervous.

"We want to know if we're worthy to serve the cranberry relish," she says.

Susan Stamberg's Cranberry Relish Tradition

Susan Stamberg's Other Favorite Holiday Cranberry Dish

Her soup looks good: "We have potato leek, vegetable beef, crab and chicken noodle." It smells great and the salad fixings are so fresh they sparkle.

"You know, I didn't bring my white gloves for the inspection tour to see if you would be worthy to sell this time-honored recipe," I say.

But the stand is really nice and nestled carefully in a bed of ice, what's on display but containers of cranberry relish.

Pink cranberry relish. My cranberry relish.

Beth opens a container. "OK, this is the big moment," she says, "Are we worthy?"

"It's a little pale," I say. "It's supposed to be more of a Pepto Bismol color."

She hands me a spoon. Slowly and carefully I take a taste.

"This is perfect," I say. She gasps.

"Perfect! We got perfect?!"

It could use a little more horseradish, but who am I to quibble. Another bite, a grin, and Beth Hansen gets the Stamberg Family Seal of Approval.

A tangy way to say Happy Thanksgiving, to her and you.

cranberry relish

Thanksgiving

Her eyes met the camera. She was there. And yet she wasn't there.

That's how NPR photographer David Gilkey remembers the moment last Saturday when he took a picture of Baby Sesay, a 45-year-old traditional healer in the village of Royail in Sierra Leone.

Goats and Soda

A Deadly Chain: Tracing Ebola In A Sierra Leone Village

Sesay had tried to cure a sick little boy. The boy died, likely of Ebola. Then Sesay herself fell ill. She had come to a community care center a few hours earlier, walking in under her own power, to be tested for the virus.

The man who runs the center called her out to talk with Gilkey and NPR correspondent Nurith Aizenman. Standing behind two rows of fencing, Sesay moved slowly but otherwise seemed OK. Gilkey was standing about 15 feet away.

Two days later, Gilkey learned that Baby Sesay had died.

What were you feeling when you took that photograph?

She's staring right toward me, but her eyes clearly are looking somewhere else. One of the weird things in covering Ebola in Liberia and Sierra Leone is that you don't see a lot of suspected cases. This was really someone who had Ebola staring you right in the eye.

And that was very unusual.

Why don't you see a lot of suspected cases?

When they're at a point when they've fallen that ill, you don't have access to them. Normally they're either at home or behind tarp fencing at a holding facility. There was a little tiny break in the fence, and she happened to be standing there. We just happened to walk up to the wrong place at the wrong time, if you want to call it that.

Did you ever think maybe you shouldn't be taking her picture?

I only took a few pictures. I guess I felt sort of ... I don't how to describe it. I felt like I wanted her to not be standing there.

i i

Ten-year-old Saah Exco was found on a beach in Liberia's West Point slum, abandoned and naked, a likely Ebola victim. Our photographer made a picture and hoped the child would recover. A day later, the boy died. David Gilkey/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption David Gilkey/NPR

Ten-year-old Saah Exco was found on a beach in Liberia's West Point slum, abandoned and naked, a likely Ebola victim. Our photographer made a picture and hoped the child would recover. A day later, the boy died.

David Gilkey/NPR

But I also feel like, look, this is what Ebola does to you, and this is something that maybe we need to see. We see survivor pictures. We see the dead. But very rarely do you see someone clearly being affected by Ebola.

Did you think she was going to die?

We all felt like she was in a place where there was at least a possibility she was going to get help. You always leave [these situations] with hope that people are going to be OK. But 48 hours later, Ebola got her. This is the second time this has happened [in covering Ebola]. In Liberia, I photographed a little boy and found out a day later he had died.

Are you sorry you took the picture?

Reporting On Ebola: An Abandoned 10-Year-Old, A Nervous Neighborhood

4 min 13 sec

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Look, I just feel horrible that that was the outcome. I don't regret taking the picture. I feel it's important for people to see what's going on in Sierra Leone. And right now Ebola is really surging in the capital and the rural areas to the north.

In the NPR report that aired this week, Baby Sesay said, "My body weak, I have a headache." Then her body grew rigid, her hands locked on a pole, her eyes were wide and frozen, she was breathing heavily.

The poor woman's about to collapse. The natural response is to jump over the fence and give her a hand, and yet you just can't do that. You really feel helpless here on a lot of levels. We did immediately cut the interview short and urged the man running the facility to tell her to go back inside and lie down.

Have there been other assignments where you photographed someone who died soon after?

Yes, in military situations. But not in a way where it seems so personal. Because she was staring at me.

Sierra Leone

ebola

[At the top of this post, you'll find a discussion from me and my Pop Culture Happy Hour colleague Stephen Thompson about Mike Nichols and his work. Stephen tells a great family story about the impact of Nichols' comedy — give it a listen.]

Separated by 21 years and joined by the direction of Mike Nichols, The Graduate and Working Girl at first seem to take up diametrically opposed attitudes toward the idea of joining the world of business. In the former, the whisper of "plastics" stands in for the inauthenticity of what Benjamin Braddock is being offered and the alienation he feels at the very idea of making that his "passion," if you can even call it that. In the latter, Tess McGill wants that office, wants that secretary, wants that rat-race commute and those meetings in high-backed leather chairs, wants the boyfriend who also knows all about mergers and acquisitions.

But what they have in common is displayed ambivalence toward wish fulfillment. Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) eventually decides that what he really wants is Elaine, so he stops her wedding and they leave together. Tess (Melanie Griffith) knows that what she really wants is to move up, and she finally arrives in her own office with her own secretary, having finally been credited for her ideas and seen her tormentor Katharine (Sigourney Weaver) thrown out. Her new beau (Harrison Ford) even packed her lunch.

In both films, though, there's palpable uncertainty. Particularly in The Graduate, once Benjamin and Elaine are on the bus together, Nichols holds on them as their expressions change from euphoria to terror, maybe back and forth one more time, and then — maybe most ominously — Elaine looks over at Benjamin, but he, who has struggled with alienation from the world for almost two hours of screen time, does not look back at her.

The ending of Working Girl is more '80s feisty and less '60s moody, scored to Carly Simon's soaring "Let The River Run" rather than Simon and Garfunkel's "The Sound Of Silence." It's lighter in tone and gives us a glimpse of Tess' gentler personality. It reminds us that she hasn't become a monster and will be kind to her own secretary (beautifully played for just a moment by the wonderful character actress Amy Aquino), and it gives her the joy of a call with her best friend Cynthia (Joan Cusack) and the secretarial pool to share the news that she has made it.

But as those who read the film closely have sometimes noted, Tess' is a small, spare, unadorned office. The walls are bare; the colors are stubbornly neutral, including those of her suit. She is not in a beautiful place. We leave her by peering in her window, and then pulling back to be reminded that she is one of countless people in countless identical offices, as she effectively vanishes into the city. She has had a victory, and she is in love, and she is happy, and she has gotten justice, but she has fulfilled a very particular fantasy very much of its moment, only a year after Wall Street. It is too much to believe that a guy like Nichols was looking uncritically at the glass slipper at issue here.

These are both stories that end with ellipses. While they're really different, they don't necessarily try to put a period at the ends of these stories; there is more to come in both cases. The words "ever after," as they usually appear at the ends of fairy tales, are nonsensical — who has ever been happy ever after? "They rode off together" and "They rode off together..." are very different ways to close your book.

Before he directed movies, Nichols directed plays, including the original productions of both Barefoot In The Park and The Odd Couple. But in addition to that, Mike Nichols came out of doing straight-up sketch comedy, as you know if you've seen the early performing he did with Elaine May, which sometimes had its own undercurrent of weird darkness. Here's a sketch in which Nichols plays a man trying to arrange a cheap funeral with a customer service representative who introduces herself as "your Grief Lady."

YouTube

He had a really good feel as a director for bringing out that uncertain, unsettled energy that suffuses the last shots of both The Graduate and Working Girl. It's a kind of narrative ambiguity that's also abundant in the unnerving film adaptation of Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?, which he also directed, which is all about initially pleasant conversation upended by agony, particularly on the part of Martha (Elizabeth Taylor). Even Barefoot In The Park, written by Neil Simon (which Nichols did not direct on film but only in the theater), is one of those comedies about young love that always seems balanced on the edge of becoming blisteringly sad and ending up a bust.

Nichols had a great feel for this tension between the foreground and the background, between the story that's being told and the often foreboding context in which it's happening, which is almost always more easily perceived than explained. That's certainly not the whole of his long career (which also included directing Catch-22 and Carnal Knowledge, The Birdcage and Silkwood, as well as the TV adaptation of Angels In America), but it may account for some of the sheer variability of it. There are loose themes of alienation and semi-alienation that recur, but they're mixed with this mischievous and delightful appreciation of absurdity that leads to that sniffling performance as the grieving funeral customer in a piece that gives most of the good lines to May.

One of the best things you can say about a long career is that there's no one through-line that can explain both that Grief Lady sketch and directing Silkwood. But stepping back from the long arc of Nichols' work does create the sense that people who instinctively understand comedy and working in teams may be better-suited than most to tackle even projects not calling directly on those skills.

A TV comedy Bill Cosby had been developing for NBC has been canceled, after new allegations of rape have been made against the comedian. Netflix made a similar move late Tuesday, shelving a comedy special that had been slated to premiere the week of Thanksgiving.

NBC on prospective Bill Cosby show: "“We can confirm that the Cosby project is no longer in development. No comment from the network. “

— Eric Deggans at NPR (@Deggans) November 19, 2014

Cosby, 77, has not publicly addressed the claims against him, which have now been made publicly by at least six women. In an NPR interview that aired over the weekend, Cosby refused to discuss the allegations.

Update at 7:10 p.m. ET: TV Land To Cease Airing 'Cosby Show'

Reruns of The Cosby Show will no longer air on TV Land, with the AP saying the show is off the air "indefinitely." The TV Land website's page for the show is now returning no content.

NPR's Eric Deggans has confirmed the news.

We'll remind you that TV Land is owned by Viacom, while NBC is majority-owned by Comcast. Viacom has been airing Cosby Show episodes for much of the past 12 years.

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Our original post continues:

Marty Singer, Cosby's attorney, has said the comedian did nothing wrong. Responding to former model Janice Dickinson's claim that Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted her, Singer called the story an "outrageous defamatory lie." In a letter to website The Wrap, Singer said the version of events Dickinson relayed this week doesn't match what she wrote about the encounter in a memoir.

Dickinson spoke to Entertainment Weekly several days after former actress Barbara Bowman wrote in last Friday's Washington Post, "Cosby had drugged and raped me, too."

As NPR's Eric Deggans wrote this week, "several recent events, including the 30th anniversary of The Cosby Show and the publication of the biography, have pushed media to reconsider Cosby's legacy."

Discussing the comedian's "huge, complicated" legacy, NPR's Gene Demby wrote in September:

"Cosby's renown has become less neat in the years since the show went off the air, his squeaky-clean family image tarnished by confessions of infidelity and allegations of sexual assault. His politics have become polarizing, and his name is invoked as a shorthand for a specific strain of black conservatism."

Bill Cosby