On a number of radio stations back in the day, playing the entire song was a Thanksgiving tradition. Some of them were commercial stations-- almost nineteen minutes of no commercials. And some of them played it twice, at noon and 3 PM.
The judge was really blind, he had a Seeing-Eye dog. He played himself in the movie (as did Officer Obie).
I hope that if you're in America, you and yours have a good Thanksgiving. Try not to punch out your racist uncle or your commie nephew.
And please, enjoy the day without resorting to rampant consumerism.
Or burning down your hostess's house.
(The previous is a complete repeat from previous years. So sue me.)
Looking back over my previous Tanksgivings posts, there were good times and not so good times. Some of the ones when I was younger became family legends.
This one has the potential to spark a lot of family stories. There will be the families that stayed apart because of the pandemic. There will be the families that took a chance and gathered together. There will be the families that did get together and had a family superspreader event. Hopefully, there will be few of those.
I wish everyone a safe day.
4 comments:
But, but but but, it wasn't about Alice, or the restaurant 😎
But that's for another day, aeh ...
Several decades ago I used to spend my summer vacations up in that neck of the woods. I made it my business to chat with the locals about the real Alice's restaurant, as well as its aftermath. Here are some trivial details, for those who, like me, are toxically into Alice's Restaurant trivia.
• Officer Obie wasn't at all hurt by the publicity the song gave him. He went on to become Sheriff Obie. He's probably dead by now.
• After the song went viral, Alice got sought out by a hedge fund that nurtured fantasies of a national chain of Alice's Restaurants. For their flagship, they took over an old inn, and built a drum-shaped dining rotunda in front of it. The New Enlarged Alice's Restaurant is long gone, but the rotunda, last time I was there, was still in place, at what is now called The Apple Tree Inn in Lenox, Mass. It's a nice place. I've stayed there several times. They have a mountainside swimming pool where, during the summer, you can dangle your feet in the water while listening to the Boston Symphony Orchestra rehearsing at Tanglewood, half a mile or so down the mountain.
• While Alice initially signed on with the hedge funders, the responsibility of running a humongous restaurant on a hill was unbearable to her. (Her original restaurant was a hole-in-the-wall in Stockbridge, Mass.) Further, the town fathers were giving her grief about leaching from the big new restaurant's septic tanks. "Alice was just a hippie," one of the locals told me, "and this was all too much for her." She ended leaving her husband and running off to the Caribbean with her Jamaican cook.
•Alice left behind a dog, a mutt who seemed to be partially Norwegian Elkhound, with maybe a little bit of Sheltie thrown in. The Inn's then-new owners after the hedge fund bailed out, a couple named Smith, tried several times to return the dog to Alice's brother, who lived in Great Barrington, roughly ten miles away. Each time, the dog ran away from the brother and found his way back to the Apple Tree Inn. The Smith;s finally decided to keep him. No objection from Alice's brother. They renamed the dog "Apples" after the inn. He served as a sort of semi-official greeter, hanging out in the parking lot behind the kitchen and leading the people in each newly arriving car to the Inn's door. Toward the end, he was so crippled by arthritis that he sometimes whimpered when he walked. And he was nearly blind, but every so often he would wander down the hill where the Smiths insisted he had "a girlfriend." Once we found him at the bottom of the hill, his arthritis so bad he couldn't quite make it back up. We gave him a lift home. The Smiths kept talking about putting him down, but it took them two years before they finally had the heart to do it.
• It appears that the Smiths have retired and the ownership of the Inn has changed at least once or twice.
• The "church," as of about five years ago, was still there — on Division Street, at the edge of Great Barrington.
Happy Thanksgiving and always remember,
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant.
(Except for Alice.)
Yours crankily,
The New York Crank
And a Happy and safe Thanksgiving to you, Ms Comrade.
I sincerely hope that yours is better than mine. I still have many things to be thankful for, despite all that 2020 has tossed my way. I hope you do too. (and this goes for each of your commenters as well)
I'll just leave the genius here:
"Wait, we cannot break bread with you. You have taken the land which is rightfully ours. Years from now my people will be forced to live in mobile homes on reservations. Your people will wear cardigans, and drink highballs. We will sell our bracelets by the road sides, and you will play golf. My people will have pain and degradation. Your people will have stick shifts. The gods of my tribe have spoken. They said do not trust the pilgrims. And especially do not trust Sarah Miller. For all these reasons I have decided to scalp you and burn your village to the ground."
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