Your Host
The only known photo of Annabel Schlair.
Annabel Schlair, your host and Front of House Manager at Picnic, the Restaurant, was born into the fabulously wealthy ruling family of Monaco and spent her childhood leading the life of a European princess on the jet-set scene.
In her teen years, Annabel came to recognize the pointlessness of her pampered and public lifestyle, and ran away from her palace home and her royal identity to become an anonymous aid worker at the devastating Ethiopian famine of the mid-1980s. Her disappearance nearly caused an international incident until she sent a wire home, assuring her parents that she was healthy and happy and had left entirely of her own free will.
Annabel adopted the anagrammatic pseudonym Elsa Chlannabir and spent several years working with an international aid organization. Although she told no one her true identity, “Elsa’s” education and especially her intimate knowledge of government and international affairs gave her a distinctive edge in her dealings with local officials and she quickly rose through the aid organization’s ranks. Her flair was noticed all around, and she eventually found herself recruited by several intelligence agencies. She became an operative for one of them (the identity of which cannot be disclosed until 2049) and took on yet another pseudonym, Lisanne Blarcha.
“Lisanne” was widely credited in diplomatic circles with providing intelligence that enabled a peaceful resolution to widespread unrest that threatened to ignite a full-scale civil war. However, an enterprising Moroccan reporter discovered Lisanne’s and Elsa’s true identities as Annabel, and told her full story in an article that eventually won him a Pulitzer Prize. Although the reporter was never able to obtain a photograph of Annabel, his uncanny descriptions of her were so spot-on that she was unable to regain any degree of privacy or anonymity in Africa or Europe.
Again seeking to avoid the glare of fame, Annabel built a small glider and launched herself from the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro. The mountain’s height, combined with her extraordinary piloting skills, allowed her to safely solo across the Atlantic (not to mention most of the African continent), the first glider pilot to do so. Exhausted and down to her last fistful of quinoa grain, she landed her glider at Teterboro Airport, and thus began a new and relatively anonymous life in New Jersey.
In the years since her arrival at Teterboro, Annabel and her family have become respected members of the Radburn, Fair Lawn community, and she finds herself finally ready to take on a more public role once again — this time as the host at Picnic, the Restaurant.