You Can Get Anything You Want…
…at Alice’s Restaurant.
Yeah yeah, old Alice Brock, the subject of Arlo Guthrie’s famous tune “Alice’s Restaurant” died last week at 83. Since its release, the song has been a Thanksgiving singalong favorite and an anti-Vietnam war anthem. The whole shebang started when Guthrie and a buddy had Thanksgiving dinner in Stockbridge with Alice and her husband Ray. After dinner, Arlo and his pal decided to help out by taking the trash to the town dump. The dump was closed, so the boys chucked the trash into a nearby ditch and got picked up for littering by a local cop named Officer Obie. Alice bailed the lads out and they paid a $50 fine.
Later, when Arlo was ordered by the Selective Service to show up at an Army induction center, he beat the draft and avoided going to Vietnam on account of the criminal record he acquired during his Thanksgiving littering incident.
Alice had a coupla different restaurants in the Berkshires over the years. The Back Room, a luncheonette in Stockbridge, flopped. Then she opened Alice’s in a ramshackle former liquor store. That bombed. We were brought in to handle the advertising on her next venture, a restaurant and hotel in Lenox called Alice’s at Avaloch. Despite her philosophy of “serving everyone, from schlumps to snobs,” that one bit the dust too. She sunk ‘em all. She swore like she drove a big Mack truck, but working with her was fun. And hey, we got some bragging rights out of it. We could say we worked with the real Alice.
Keep your dukes up.
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