Alice May Brock (born February 28, 1941) is an American artist, occasional author and former restaurateur. A resident of Massachusetts for her entire adult life, Brock owned and operated three restaurants in the Berkshires—The Back Room, Take-Out Alice and Alice's at Avaloch—in succession between 1965 and 1979. The first of these served as the inspiration for Arlo Guthrie's song "Alice's Restaurant", which in turn inspired a 1969 film of the same name. Early life Brock was born Alice May Pelkey in Brooklyn, New York City, to a Jewish mother and a Gentile father. The Pelkey family was relatively well-to-do and often spent summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where Mr. Pelkey sold artwork for Peter Hunt. Neither of her parents were religious, though her mother was culturally Jewish and she herself identifies as a Jew; she later described her family life as dysfunctional and her father as abusive, noting she still loved her parents but found them difficult to please. After a stint in reform school, she attended Sarah Lawrence College. Brock described herself as politically active as early as her teen years. After graduating college, she spent a short period of time in Greenwich Village, where in 1962, she met, then married Ray Brock, a woodworker, shop teacher, and real estate flipper from Virginia who was in his mid-30s at the time, over a decade older than Alice. By 1964, they had found work together at the Stockbridge School in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, with Ray working as a shop teacher and Alice as a librarian. With a loan from her mother, they purchased a deconsecrated church in Great Barrington, which the couple converted into a residence for themselves and a gathering place for friends and like-minded bohemians. She would later describe the choice of a church for the group as a form of sacrilege, using a symbol of tradition and established religion to further her counterculture values. In 1991, the long-neglected building was restored and transformed into The Guthrie Center at Old Trinity Church, an interfaith worship center and performance venue. Littering incident One of the Brocks' students at the Stockbridge School had been Arlo Guthrie, at the time an aspiring forester, a half-Jewish New York transplant like Brock, and the son of then-ailing folk icon Woody Guthrie. When Arlo Guthrie left Rocky Mountain College in Montana for Thanksgiving break in November 1965, he stayed at the Brocks' residence for their annual