Word: life
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...local team, so this was certainly a treat. They had played at least a minor part in making it possible for Harvard to have its second worst day of total offense in the part in the past twelve years. It was the greatest win of Larry Naviaux's life, and maybe while he was being smothered on his own 30 yard line by three phys. ed. majors, Frank Champi was able to think of how happy Larry Naviaux was at that point in time...
...that doesn't make life any better for Ray and Alice's friends, even though it should. They set up a restaurant for Alice in the middle of Stockbridge, but it collapses in a marital spat between the Brocks. Shelly, a guy in the group who likes motorcycles, art and heroin, kicks the smack habit only to revert to it later on when he discovers that he can't have Alice for his very own. Arlo beats the draft only to realize that "the good things in [his] life seem to come out of not doing what [he] doesn...
...SONG tells us, "You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant, exceptin' Alice" -and that's the whole story. We can't get Alice. We can't get at that central heartbeat that is the real source of life any better than Richard Nixon can. And if we can't get at that, we might as well be dead. When Shelly discovers that he can't have Alice, he not only goes back to heroin, but he kills himself...
Arlo's father, needless to say, was Woody Guthrie. Guthrie, now dead, was one of the giant figures of the Bonnie and Clyde era of American history. As a depression folksinger-songwriter, he was both social critic and super-patriot. During the last fifteen years of his life, a congenital nerve disease paralyzed, silenced and slowly killed him. (The same disease could hit Arlo in his thirties...
...Arlo's hospital calls, Pete Secger. Woody's friend and fellow folksinger, is also present. Secger sings one of Woody's songs to him: "... Along your green valley I'll live till I die My life I'll defend with my life if it be For my pastures of plenty must always be free...