AIAlice’s Restaurant •  About This Site  • Midnite Bob Productions

About AIAlice’s Restaurant

Or: Why We Named It This, and Why We’re Not Sitting on the Group W Bench

In 1965, a young folk singer named Arlo Guthrie hauled a bag of garbage to a dump in Stockbridge, Massachusetts and found it closed for Thanksgiving. He left the trash on the side of the road anyway. He got arrested. He paid a $25 fine. And two years later he turned the whole ridiculous story into an eighteen-minute talking blues song that ended up in the Library of Congress.

The restaurant itself — Alice’s Restaurant — was owned by his friend Alice Brock, and it plays almost no role in the song at all beyond being the subject of the chorus and the reason Guthrie was in Stockbridge in the first place. But the name stuck. Because the name was never really about the restaurant. It was about the idea of a place where you could get anything you want. Where the door was open, the coffee was hot, and nobody asked too many questions before feeding you.

That idea is what AIAlice’s Restaurant is built on.

The AI in AIAlice’s Restaurant stands for Artificial Intelligence — specifically the collaborative work between human writers and AI co-creators that happens here. Take the A and the I, and you get Alice. Put Alice behind a counter in a fictional diner on the banks of a fictional river, and you have a place where writers come to get fed. Where stories get coverage. Where plays get a proper reading. Where nobody generates Sanka.

The name AIAlice’s Restaurant is a federally trademarked brand under Midnite Bob Productions. It is an original creative work — not an adaptation, not a derivative, not an attempt to trade on Arlo Guthrie’s name or music. It is an homage in the oldest sense of the word: one artist tipping his hat to another artist’s idea and then building something new from the inspiration.

Out of respect for that inspiration, we reached out to the Guthrie Estate directly. We received no objection to what we are doing here. We took that as the nod it was — and we are grateful for it.

Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant was about the absurdity of institutions that miss the point. AIAlice’s Restaurant is about creative collaboration that finds it.

The real Alice Brock passed away in November 2024 at the age of 83. She was an artist, a restaurateur, and the unwitting inspiration for one of the most beloved songs in American folk music. We tip our hat to her too. Any place that carries her name — even at a considerable remove, across a fictional river, in a multi-universe where kindness and a wicked sense of humor are the only requirements — ought to be worth her blessing.

You can get anything you want here.

Pull up a stool.

— Midnite Bob, Midnite Bob Productions, Shreveport Louisiana

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