Breaking Bread with Alice
Drawing by Jason McWhorter from My Life as a Restaurant by Alice Brock, courtesy Alice Brock
By Anastasia Stanmeyer
Photos Courtesy Alice Brock
From the pages of our Holiday 2022 Issue.
“Do you know where Alice Brock lives?”
I called up to two women sitting on a balcony, trying to hide my frustration. After circling the neighborhood for a good 15 minutes, I just couldn’t find her home.
The women looked at each other, then one called down to me, “Alice who?”
“Alice Brock.”
I knew I was close, but the numbering in this cluster of cottages and low-rise buildings on the west end of Provincetown was confusing. The two women turned to each other, exchanged a few words, then one said to me, “Alice doesn’t live here anymore.”
I caught my breath. How could that be? I talked to her on the phone—or at least I thought it was her—and had arranged a meeting. Lunch for two in a brown paper bag sat on the passenger seat of my car.
“She lived on the east end. I think she died a few years ago,” the woman added.
I would have thought the same several months ago—that Alice was just a part of Berkshire folklore, ever present but nowhere to be found. I had stumbled upon an article from 1965 with a headline that read, “Youths Ordered to Clean Up Rubbish Mess.” We know the story well: Young Arlo Guthrie and his friend, Rick Robbins, were living at Alice and Ray Brock’s home, a former church in Housatonic. On Thanksgiving weekend, they were arrested for littering. Alice bailed them out, the two appeared before a judge, were fined $25 each, and ordered to pick up all the trash. Not long after that incident, Arlo wrote the 18½-minute-long “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” an anti-war song about littering. It was released in 1967 as a live recording and has been a Thanksgiving institution ever since, played in homes across the country and on radio stations. A film by Arthur Penn spurred by the song is a cult classic.
But where’s Alice? I looked her up on Wikipedia. The entry gave a birthdate, but no end date. I dug deeper, found a phone number, called and left a voicemail, and then went on my merry way, not expecting anything more.
But she did call. We exchanged emails and phone calls until, one late summer’s day, I jumped in my car and took a drive to the Cape—playing that rambling story-song on my car stereo over and over again. I found myself joining the chorus, my voice loud and clear (only to myself, thankfully): You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant.
Which leads me to this moment, double-parked, two salads topped with grilled salmon tucked in to-go containers by my side. I was already booked at the nearby Cape Colony Motel—I was lucky to even find a room this time of year—and could feel my body begin to sweat from the merciless sun. Or was it from anxiety? I did the only thing I could do. I called Alice. The woman on the other end of the line answered right away, and after a brief description of my surroundings, we realized that I was a driveway away from her place. I looked up to the women still sitting on the balcony and called out, “I found Alice, she’s right next door!” They looked at me as if I had lost my mind, then turned back to their conversation.
I found a parking space, walked across a short garden pathway, and knocked on the door. Alice, dressed in a purple sweater with her hair perfectly styled, greeted me matter-of-factly and directed me to put the bag on the kitchen table. She had been sitting there for a while, watching two hummingbird feeders outside the bay windows. She put her hands on the table in front of her. “This is the only thing I brought with me from the Berkshires. It has two leafs. We used to all sit around this table in the church whenever we got together. This is where Arlo wrote ‘Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,’ or at least some of it. We were all making up choruses, but he had his own ideas.” She smiled to herself.
Alice asked how I found her. Somewhat embarrassingly, I told her that it started when I stumbled upon an old article and looked her name up on Wikipedia. I turned to my phone and began recording our conversation. I barely placed it back on the kitchen table when she said, “Wikipedia. That’s such bullshit. Don’t believe a word of it.”
“That’s why I’m here, Alice.”
I found myself captivated by this woman, now in her 80s—a straight shooter and ageless beauty with unwavering confidence. She was fearless. I scanned the room: The walls were filled with her paintings and drawings, as well as works by other artists from the Cape and Berkshire-based friend Jim Youngerman. This lovely little home held the stories of her past: a challenging childhood, a volatile marriage, a reluctant move from New York City to the Berkshires, a colorful life of creating. She opened up not one, not two, but three restaurants; published a few cookbooks, a children’s book, and illustrated one of Arlo’s children’s books; and left everything she had in the Berkshires and moved to P-town, where she focused on her art and came to terms with her claim to fame as the Alice of Alice’s Restaurant.
Here, in her cozy little cottage, she began to serve up her history at the kitchen table.
Alice Brock, as shown on the back cover of Alice’s Restaurant Cookbook.
Alice’s parents met in Provincetown; her mom was on holiday with some girlfriends and her father had opened a gallery in the middle of town. They married and settled back in Brooklyn, where her mother was from and where Alice was born. Her family lived on the top two floors of a brownstone they owned, and the bottom two were rented. “I was a very difficult child. Nobody could tell me what to do. I was always getting in trouble. My mother always said, ‘Where’s Alice? Where’s Alice?’”
Alice loved to draw from an early age. Her father encouraged her and often took her to the theater and to museums. She was sent off to Cedar Knolls School for Girls, graduated from White Plains High School in New York, and enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College. By that time, her parents had moved to Pittsfield, where her father was born and raised and where their relatives still lived. They wanted their youngest daughter out of the city so she wouldn’t get in trouble like her big sister.
Alice dropped out of college after her sophomore year.
“What happened?”
“The ’60s happened.”
Alice Brock serving it up to her friends, from the pages of Alice’s Restaurant Cookbook. ANASTASIA STANMEYER
Alice moved to an apartment on Lafayette Street in Greenwich Village, started waitressing, and immersed herself in the political movements of the times. She was a member of the Socialist Workers Party and a founding member of Students for a Democratic Society and Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Then Alice May Pelkey met Ray Brock at Cedar Street Tavern in Greenwich Village. “I was still very involved in politics, and Ray didn’t want me to have that other life. He wanted to get me out of there. My mother wanted to get me out of there, too.”
Her mother, Mary Pelkey, was the registrar at the Stockbridge School. The private school was planning to take a group of students to Europe for three months, and Mary wanted to go. “So she gets in touch with me and says that she’s gonna have to drain the pipes in her house and get her car up on blocks. ‘Why don’t you and Ray come and live here while I’m in Europe?’ I said, ‘Okay, we’re up for anything.’”
Alice and Ray moved into her mom’s home in the winter of 1962 and adopted a dog they named Fasha. When Mary returned from her trip, Alice and Ray stayed and built an apartment in her barn. Alice worked as a waitress at the Log Cabin Restaurant on Route 71a in Lenox. Her mom said that she could get them jobs at the Stockbridge School, and Alice and Ray could live on campus—as long as they got married first. Reluctantly, Alice agreed. She was 19 and Ray was 32. Ray, a trained architect and sculptor, taught shop class; Alice was the librarian. “I loved books, so I really got into it,” she says.
Alice made friends with the students at Stockbridge School. She was only a few years older than they were. “We were beatniks, and the kids were very attracted to both of us because we were different. We had our own little cottage on campus, and they used to come over, hang out, drink beer, stuff like that.”
The couple returned to New York City after a year, despite the fact that Alice’s mother bought them the old Trinity Church in Housatonic for $1,500 as a wedding present in 1963. Ray found his way back to the Berkshires soon enough and worked on the church to make it livable. Alice would go there on the weekends, eventually joining him full-time. “We couldn’t really deal with the big part of the church. That was just a huge place. We built a little addition to the downstairs of the bell tower. The main part of the church was used for construction work and motorcycle repair.
Alice Brock in the kitchen of Take Out Alice, which later was named Alice’s Restaurant. At right, Alice Brock today in her home in Provincetown. JANE MCWHORTER
“When we decided to live in the church, all those kids had graduated from Stockbridge School,” continued Alice. “They went to college for, like, two weeks.” One of those kids was Arlo Guthrie. After four years of high school in Stockbridge, Arlo entered Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Montana. He was back in the Berkshires within weeks, in November of 1965. “They all came back to the church because we were welcoming,” says Alice. “We were these parent figures who were bohemians with plenty of room. It was okay with their parents, because we were teachers. In fact, some parents even gave me $10 a week to feed the kids. Ten dollars a week to feed a teenage boy!”
Alice and Ray wanted to invite friends to their new home, so they planned a Thanksgiving gathering and set up tables in the main part of the church. “There was this old coal furnace in the basement, which we actually fired up, because it was cold. To get ready, we had to clean up the main part of the church. There was a lot of building debris there from making our living quarters in the tower. Arlo and Rick took our Volkswagen bus and loaded it up with the debris to take to the dump, but the dump was closed for Thanksgiving.
“So Arlo said, ‘I know a place where people dump garbage.’ They went over there, and they dumped it all—pieces of rug, boards, insulation, stuff like that. Some old couple driving by saw them and reported them to the police. It’s all the police had to do on Thanksgiving weekend, right? They went down there, and sure enough, there was all the garbage. They took some photographs of it, and Chief of Police William Obanhein— “Officer Obie”—found this letter with our address on it. He called me up, and I said, ‘Oh dear, well, I’ll send those boys right over to you.’ And I said to Arlo and Rick, ‘Hey guys, go down to the Stockbridge Police Department and see what the story is. I don’t want him to arrest you.’ Well, they did arrest them, and they put them in jail. And I had to go around collecting nickels and dimes to bail them out. Fifty dollars bail. Who had that? I didn’t know they were going to be arrested. When I went there, I chewed out that chief of police. They picked up the garbage, and then we had our Thanksgiving dinner the next day.”
After the holiday weekend, Arlo and Rick went to court in Lee. “I remember tying up their hair, trying to make it look short with bobby pins and stuff. There used to be this judge in Pittsfield, Judge Hannon, and he was blind, came with a seeing eye dog. That was in the song. ‘Blind justice.’ Some of these things are really true. We thought that was the end of it, but then Arlo wrote the song.”
She rested her hands on the table, and her voice softened.
Alice bought a semi-ramshackle former liquor store on Route 183 near Housatonic in 1973 and called it Take Out Alice, from My Life as a Restaurant.
“We lived at this table. I traded one of the pews for this table. There was this guy around the corner who had a barn of used stuff, and I used to go over there and visit with him, and I saw this table. One of the reasons why I got into cooking is that you break bread together around a table. And that’s a concept I like.”
Alice’s mother suggested that she make a business out of her cooking talents. “She said, ‘There’s a little diner for sale in Stockbridge. You’re cooking for all these kids. Why don’t you rent the diner? I’ll help you. You’ll have a restaurant, and you’ll have something to do in the afternoon.’” Alice laughed. “It got me out of the house, and I got my own money.”
In 1966, Alice opened The Back Room down an alleyway in Stockbridge. Everybody called it Alice’s, though. (It was later renamed “Theresa’s Cafe” under a new owner. It has since closed, although there are still signs and it is a photo-taking stop for visitors and locals alike.) Alice recalls having to sign an affidavit that was called “married woman doing business on her own,” so that her husband would not be responsible for her debts.
“I didn’t know anything about the restaurant business, except that I had been a waitress. But I did love to cook. I just winged it. I’ve done that most of my life, and I’ve been very lucky. I really cooked my heart out there, and the food was fabulous. It was a tiny place that had a counter with a few stools, two or three tables, and one or two booths. I made up all the dishes. We needed something besides hamburgers, BLTs, or whatever. So I put omelets on the lunch menu. I never made an omelet until somebody ordered it. I made up a lot of recipes, and I picked up recipes from different countries. I never made batches of anything except soup. Everything else was made in a little sauté pan for that one person.”
The diner was buzzing; Stockbridge was filled with summer cottage residents who ate there. Psychiatrists and patients from Austen Riggs also were frequent diners. In her book, My Life as a Restaurant, Alice wrote, “The summer of the first restaurant was an exciting one for all of Stockbridge. The Berkshire Playhouse was reorganizing and trying to be something more than just a summer theater. Lots of stars and soon-to-be stars were in town. Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman liked hamburgers with onion, green peppers, and an egg in them. Frank Langella was called Mr. Mushroom Omelet. Anne Bancroft was wonderful, and when her whole family came up, I cooked giant meals; when they stayed late, she helped me clear the table.”
A visit to The Back Room, later called Theresa’s Cafe, found down an alley off Main Street in Stockbridge.
Ray and Alice weren’t getting along at that point, so she moved out of the church and stayed in a cottage behind the restaurant. She closed the restaurant because it was just too much to handle. Then, in the fall of 1967, Alice and Ray had a second wedding— a ceremony to renew their vows, followed by a big party—at their home. The next year, she left Ray, took off to Puerto Rico, and then spent time with friends in Boston.
Her father, who was on the board of directors at The Berkshire Playhouse, told the Thanksgiving story to Arthur Penn, who lived in Stockbridge. The song already had come out, and Penn, who had just finished up Bonnie and Clyde, said it would make a great movie. So he co-wrote the screenplay in 1967 with Venable Herndon.
The following year, Penn called Alice back to the Berkshires, where all her friends had signed up to be in the movie. The movie was shot on location in Stockbridge and Housatonic. “We were sitting around for eight hours, eating Kentucky Fried Chicken. Of course, we all got to be friends with Obie. He really got to know us.”
The film, Alice’s Restaurant, stars Arlo as himself; Pat Quinn as Alice; James Broderick as Ray Brock; Pete Seeger as himself; Judge James Hannon as himself; Police Chief Obanhein as himself, Officer Obie. Alice declined to play herself but made a number of cameo appearances. (She and Ray divorced the same day that they were filming the wedding scene for the movie.) Alice’s Restaurant was released in 1969, a few days after Guthrie appeared at the Woodstock Festival.
From Alice’s Restaurant Cookbook: A doctored still from the movie Alice’s Restaurant, which was released in 1967.
The producer and Alice became pals on the set, and he suggested that Alice write a cookbook. “So I did. I wrote a few of them.”
Alice gets up from the kitchen table and walks slowly to a stack of miscellaneous books, pulls out two, and puts them on the kitchen table. The first is The Alice’s Restaurant Cookbook, published in 1969, which includes her illustrations. “I didn’t have a test kitchen at the time, so I would just cook it in my head,” she says. The book features her recipes and hippie wisdom, as well as photos and publicity stills from the movie and a plastic record in the back with Brock and Guthrie bantering on two tracks, “Italian-Type Meatballs” and “My Granma’s Beet Jam.” Her 1976 autobiography with recipes, My Life as a Restaurant, was illustrated by Jason McWhorter and photographed by Jane McWhorter. “I’m a much better cook than when I wrote those books,” she says.
Alice also wrote a children’s book, How to Massage Your Cat, first published in 1985, and she illustrated Arlo Guthrie’s children’s book, Mooses Come Walking, published in 2004.
The Brocks sold the church in the early 1970s. Alice had earned enough to rent a little house in Stockbridge. With the help of her mother, she bought a semi-ramshackle former liquor store on Route 183 near Housatonic in 1973 and called it Take Out Alice. “It had been one of those stores where they sold beer, wine, shotgun shells, and dirty magazines. And I think there might have been a gas pump out front. But it did have a beer and wine license, which was good, and I kept a little area that sold beer and wine. Eventually, I built a restaurant around the takeout and added on a dining room.”
She changed the name to Alice’s Restaurant. “It was a challenge running the restaurant with all the town rules, like you can’t serve any alcoholic beverage unless someone orders a full meal. There was a Sunday law where you couldn’t serve over the bar. So we had the stools out in the middle, and the bartender would walk around and hand them the drink.”
Additional expansion of the restaurant was denied, so Alice turned her sights to a much larger operation—an estate in Lenox, where she converted into her third and final restaurant in 1976, Alice’s at Avaloch (now the Apple Tree Inn). It came with a dining room, a bar with space for live music, and a disco floor housed in a gazebo. It also had an apple orchard, a tennis court, a swimming pool, and a motel. The restaurant seated more than 100 guests and was patronized by musicians performing at nearby Tanglewood and at the Music Inn, including Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, and Van Morrison.
“I poured a lot of money into it and didn’t even have a manager. I cooked, plus I did the prep. So I was up at five o’clock in the morning and started working. I took a little nap in the afternoon, and then I went down and cooked the dinner.”
The challenges were too great, and Alice walked away from it all. With shoeboxes filled with quarters from the motel’s Coca-Cola vending machines, she loaded up her Cadillac with her belongings and made her way to Provincetown in 1978.
Alice rented a small apartment on the water with those quarters. She worked in restaurants and did some catering, but mostly she walked the beaches picking up stones and daydreaming, drawing, and painting. A year later, there was an artists open studio weekend, and Alice thought, “Why not do this?” So she framed a bunch of artwork and posters, displayed her collection of painted rocks and assortment of books, and hung out a hand-painted sign that read, “Alice Brock Studio.”
“I was very resentful of being Alice of Alice’s Restaurant. For many years, it really pissed me off, because it was like I was frozen in time. Here I had done all these other things, but everybody saw the movie, and they thought they knew me. They thought they owned me, because I was a public person. But when I had this little gallery, people would come in and they would eventually ask, ‘Are you the Alice?’ One woman just burst into tears. Everybody told me their story about where they were in the ’60s. Kids were telling me that their parents made them listen to that song every year. Then it became, oh, my grandparents made me listen to that song every year. When I saw that all I had to do was say my name, and it just brought wonderful memories to people, I thought, ‘What the f—k is wrong with me? How lucky can I be?’ So now, it’s not like I say, ‘Oh, hi, I’m Alice of Alice’s Restaurant,’ but I don’t keep it a secret.”
After her third restaurant in the Berkshires, Alice Brock loaded up her Cadillac and made her way to Provincetown in 1978. JANE MCWHORTER
Alice now lives in the quieter West End, in this two-bedroom cottage. Arlo bought the church in 1991 and created the non-profit Guthrie Center. And through the years, Thanksgiving has been a tradition with her core friends from the church.
After she left the Berkshires, they would get together at Benno Friedman’s home in Sheffield. That included Tigger Bruinn and her husband, Jim; Billy Russell and his wife, Sandy; Rick Robbins and his wife, Laurie, as well as their son (Alice’s godson) Jesse Robbins. In 2014, Alice cohosted a revival of her famed Alice’s Restaurant at the Dream Away Lodge in Becket. She hasn’t returned to the area since; her friends have come up to Provincetown for Thanksgiving. This year, though, she plans to make her way back for a private Thanksgiving gathering. That’s what she loves the most about the Berkshires, the friends that she made and kept, and sharing those special memories.
“What is it about your persona that transcends time?” I asked Alice, winding down our conversation and eating the last of our lunch. She gave it a moment.
“I guess I’m the Earth Mother, the living legend from the ’60s, a symbol of the time. It was a time of great freedom. We had finally broken loose from the straight-ass late ’40s and ’50s, and it was really an exciting time. Even though we didn’t change the world, we changed a lot of things.”
Cooking Exercises
Exercise while you’re cooking. If you’re on your feet stirring a pot, you can hug your knees to your chest. (Don’t try both of them at once.) This keeps all the blood from rushing to your feet and creating varicose veins and fat ankles.
Another thing you might do if you’re figure-conscious is keep all your ingredients on the top shelf. That way you have to reach for everything, and reaching and stretching is good for your waistline.
Or put everything on the floor.
If you have to sit down and peel 15 potatoes, you might try wiggling your toes or your ankles while you’re doing it, and if you drop something, try to pick it up without bending your knees. It won’t really get you in shape, but it’ll make you feel better about the heavy cream you’re putting in your Newburg sauce.
— Alice’s Restaurant Cookbook
My Granma’s Beet Jam
This is very unusual and really fantastically good. My granma used to make it a lot.
◗ 4 pounds of real beets
◗ 3 pounds of sugar
◗ 3 lemons (juice and grated rind)
◗ 2 ounces of ginger root
◗ 1/2 pound of almonds or walnuts
Wash and peel the beets. Put them through a meat grinder, or grate them. Barely cover them with water and cook them slowly until they are tender. Add the sugar, the ginger (cut up fine), the lemon juice and lemon rind. Cook until thick and clear (at least an hour). And then add the chopped nuts.
This stuff keeps. Give some to your friends—it’s really something else.
— Alice’s Restaurant Cookbook