Food & Film: Alice’s Restaurant

Days Of Yore

This will be a different Thanksgiving dinner for many of us. We usually host a mid afternoon turkey based celebration with our friends and occasional extra seat for someone who is homeless for this unique American holiday. This year, we are getting ours from  Open Hand (and taking advantage of their discount to KD readers)  while joining our far-flung daughters via Skype, Whatsapp or  Zoom (which will be free for Thanksgiving this year)– whichever they feel is more technically friendly to them. Indeed, this scenario is very different from our usual wacky Turkey celebration, which normally has a second part on Sunday – Zee Toorki Sahnveesh Pahty,  I remember a time in my modestly misspent youth when I was wearing long skirts made from resewn Levis and my husband, after nine blissful years at UVA, eschewed a law career and went into construction as a timekeeper. He had always  loved the industry ever since he had worked in construction crews as a teenager. We were guided by The Whole Earth Catalog and were relentless in trying to buy organic products – no easy feat back then. But we usually spent a Thanksgiving holiday afternoon watching the 1969 film Alice’s Restaurant often with our daughters when they were toddlers. We realized later that it was a Thanksgiving tradition with many other twenty and thirty somethings too. 

A Song Becomes A Film

The film is very loosely based on an 18 minute blues song recorded by Arlo Guthrie (son of Woody Guthrie, if you need a refresher course in American folk song troubadours). This sort of talking-song- saga celebrates his arrest for littering after a Thanksgiving meal with Alice and Ray Brock. The litterbug arrest saved him from getting drafted during the Viet Nam War. The film was conceived and  directed by Arthur Penn, who also directed Bonnie And Clyde and Little Big Man. It is definitely a kinder, gentler film about the hippie counter-culture of my youth. You will see an early Joannie Mitchell, and Lee Hays and Peter Seeger of the The Weavers fame. Some of the real life characters (and I include the blind judge at Arlo’s trial) play themselves in the film.

But Wait There’s More

Although she played an extra in the film, there really is an Alice Brock and her partner Ray. And yes, they did live in a church and she did have a counter-culture styled restaurant. She was very resentful of the fame bequeathed by Penn’s film. She and Ray divorced and she sold their church home.  He died, she moved to Provincetown and painted rocks and wrote a second book titled How To Massage Your Cat, which is very funny but not helpful in feline reflexology. The church was  purchased by Arlo in 1991 and turned into a non-denominational worship center. It hosts a “Thanksgiving Dinner that can’t be beat” for the local community and there is an annual “Garbage Trail Walk” made famous by the song. The proceeds go to raise money for Huntington’s Disease research.  Woody Guthrie died a very slow and painful death from this disease which is genetically passed. But Alice actually wrote this cookbook with funny drawings ,and  typical counter-culture prose We used to sell it at the shop (in the very early days) replete with a recorded introduction by Arlo. And yes, truthfully, I cooked out of it. And probably dressed like it too.