Alice and Sea Bee

It's windy as heck out there this morning. I woke to find our garden waste bag all the way across the garden by the back shed -- I've never seen it travel that far! Gwynneth's phrase "blowing a hoolie" comes to mind, though with winds only between 20-30 mph, maybe it's not really a proper hoolie. It's a good thing I uncovered the avocado, or its billowy shroud would be somewhere over Windsor Castle by now.

The leaves have mostly come off the trees, as you can see above, giving the grass a colorful carpet.

I spent most of yesterday in and around the house. In addition to my normal weekend trifecta of vacuuming/laundry/garden I caught up on blogs and polished off another New Yorker. I'm still five issues behind.

Here are my pals Frank, Rich and Joe back in August 2001, when we drove up to Massachusetts to go to Tanglewood, the summer performance grounds of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. We happened to drive through Stockbridge, where we encountered the restaurant made famous by Arlo Guthrie in his song "Alice's Restaurant Massacree." You may have seen the news that Alice Brock, the former proprietor of Alice's, just died, which is what inspired me to share this photo.

We didn't actually enter the restaurant, which by then was known as Theresa's (and still is, I believe). It either wasn't open or we weren't hungry at that moment, I can't remember. In fact, I'm not sure we even saw the restaurant itself, which is down a side alley off the main street in Stockbridge. We may have been content to pose at the sign.

While I'm at it, here's another photo from that same trip. That's me, in front of a mysterious upended ship stranded in the parking lot of a shopping center across from our hotel in Pittsfield, Mass. Until yesterday I never quite knew the story of this bizarre spectacle, but we thought it was weird enough to merit a photo.

Through the miracle of the Internet I have learned that this was an artwork created by a California sculptor named Dustin Schuler. As you can see on the hull, it was called Sea Bee. The owner of the shopping center installed it in 1990, and it was a subject of some local controversy before being removed in 2002, only a year after we took the photo above. Schuler took it back to his home turf and installed it in truncated form on the campus of California State University at Fullerton.

I love how someone decided that as long as there's a big boat upended in the parking lot, may as well put a trash can next to it. And someone else thought, "Hey, I'll park in the shade!"