JeffRuss1972
09-11-2005, 06:48 PM
This may be an interesting read, taken from The Great TV Sitcom Book by Rick Mitz(1980) on the show ALICE.
ALICE was one of those shows where, if the main character had gotten what she wanted, if she'd been able to fulfill her dream, then there wouldn't have been any more show. Alice Hyatt wanted to be a singer. But, in the meantime, she worked as a waitress in Mel's Diner. She was a good singer---oh, how did we know? Well, we heard her performing the show's title tune each week: "There's a new world out there . . ."
But still, what made Alice different from her long-lost sitcom sisters is that Alice had a job, but longed for a career. The others in the TV job market---Suzie McNamera, Miss Brooks, Schultzy, et al.---all held jobs until they could find a man to hold.
Still, in many ways, ALICE was just like everything else on television during the late seventies. It had the sight gags and the silly jokes and the sassy allusions to sex---low humor---but it had two things that made it a hit: good acting and a good concept. Whether the American public realized it or not, the subliminal message of ALICE was that Sisterhood Is Powerful. It was Flo and Vera and Alice all the way. There was a loyalty that existed between them, a support system that, week after week, no matter what the trial, no matter what the tribulation, couldn't be shaken. Although their personalities were all different (and sometimes bizarre), they always stuck together---through loneliness, through crises, and through their ill-fated relationships with men. There was a true affection among the three of them. They were sort of the women's auxiliary of the M*A*S*H doctors, only their battlefield was Mel's Diner, run by the tough (but tender), cranky Mel.
It all came from a movie (which was not a comedy) called ALICE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE, all about a New Mexico widow who takes her son and moves to Phoenix in search of a singing career. What she finds instead is a job at a diner, a job at raising her son, and a job at working out a relationship with a guy she's met (Ellen Burstyn and Kris Kristofferson played Alice and her beau.)
ALICE was as abbreviated from the concept of the movie as its title was. The premise was basically the same---she landed in Phoenix, but came from New Jersey (and sounded like it)---but she never met Kris Kristofferson, although she had lots of other mismatched relationships.
Her two co-workers consisted of a loudmouthed, raunchy, softy of an old hand waitress named Flo, and a dingdong, timid waitress named Vera. The premiere dialogue went like this:
ALICE: My husband's been dead six months and some life insurance company is still trying to sell him a policy.
VERA: When was his birthday?
ALICE: September seventeenth.
VERA: Oh, a Virgo. That's a good sign. Robust and healthy. Ooops. Sorry, Alice.
MEL: You mean he never had a policy?
ALICE: Never. Don didn't believe in insurance.
MEL: How come?
ALICE: It didn't come in a six-pack.
FLO (to Mel) : If it did, you'd be the most overinsured man in the world.
MEL: Keep it up, Flo, and you're gonna get one from column A and one from column B.
FLO: Mel---kiss mah grits!
Of the three, Flo was the most colorful. What came out of her brain came out of her mouth. Some examples:
FLO: If Mel doesn't give us a raise soon, I'm gonna have to swallow my pride and marry that Texas millionaire.
ALICE: What Texas millionaire?
FLO: The first one that asks me.
And when one of her gentleman friends comes into the diner for breakfast:
FLO: Earl, honey, what would you like this morning?
EARL: The same thing I had last night.
Brassy and sassy, her favorite expressions were "Kiss mah grits," "When donkeys fly," and "You bet your sweet patoot." But it was her blue humor---baby blue, to be sure---that got her the most laughs. "You ought to see my new bikini," she once announced. "It came in a plain brown wrapper."
Once Mel asked her to carry in a sack of sugar. "If I'm gonna get a bad back," Flo caws, "it's not gonna be from lifting sugar."
Vera, on the other hand, probably would get a bad back from lifting sugar. But the real question is: where did she get such a bad brain?
MEL: I'm gonna live on easy street.
VERA: You mean you're giving up your apartment?
Or:
MEL: I'm a humanitarian.
VERA: Mel, you've never been in church a day of your life.
And:
HENRY: We love the ambience of Mel's Diner.
CUSTOMER: What's ambience?
VERA: That's what they pick you up in after you've eaten Mel's food.
And she wasn't kidding.
Later in the series, Vera became less stupid and more innocent (i.e., she said the same idiotic things, but the motivations were different. So she became dizzy instead of dumb).
Besides Vera's lame brain and Flo's sex life, Mel's cooking was the main source of jokes on the show. Here are some of the bad food jokes (that is, good jokes about bad food . . . and sometimes bad jokes about bad food; the bad food remained the constant on ALICE):
MEL (about to retire) : One more hour and my cooking days are over.
FLO: Your cooking days were over the day you attacked that stove.
MEL: Stow it, Flo.
FLO: You know, Mel, the doctors of Phoenix oughta get together and stop you from retiring---they're gonna lose a fortune.
When the jokes subsided, it was Linda Lavin, as Alice, who kept the show together. She was part of a new breed of sitcom heroines. Not the silly ones who did wacky things like Lucy or Margie or Gracie. Nor was she like the sitcom mommies of the fifties and early sixties---Margaret Anderson, Donna Reed, Harriet Nelson. Plus, she wasn't an Edith Bunker or a Maude Findlay, one of the larger-than-life ladies. She was somewhere between Mary Richards and Ann Romano; she was a reactor. She didn't do dumb things. She was sensible and calm; Lavin was generous enough as an actress to bring out the humor in the people around her. Sort of the litmus0paper performer.
Lavin was a little anxious about taking the part of Alice, at first, because Ellen Burstyn, who'd won an Academy Award for the movie version, was so firmly embedded in audience's minds. But she turned Alice into her own character---warm and witty and knowing. Her Broadway experience and her guest shots on other sitcoms (as well as a year as detective Janice Wentworth on BARNEY MILLER in 1975) all paid off on ALICE, which could have been a thankless acting job. Alice went about solving everybody else's problems---it could have been retitled GO ASK ALICE---and intervening in their crises. Plus sitting back and smiling while other people around her got the big laughs.
But not always. Sometimes Alice did say some funny things herself (though different from the mindless mouthings of the other characters).
TOMMY (Alice's son, who wants her to take a job singing) : If you didn't have me, I bet you'd say "Yes" just like that.
ALICE: That's why I have you---because I said "Yes" just like that.
Very often, ALICE---like so many other sitcoms of the era---was guilty of that school of sitcom writing called Fill-In-the-Blank Dialogue. Pick a subject, any subject, and the writers could come up with predictable jokes. The subject for the week, one week, was: Marriage. Flo, who'd been married three times, was going to marry Mel's brother Al, who'd also been married three times. Here is some of the dialogue that took place on that episode:
CUSTOMER: I didn't know you had a brother, Mel.
MEL: Yeah---he's a little younger than me.
VERA: That's because Mel was born before him.
MEL: My brother's coming here to forget his alimony. He's doing so well in the used car business, he can afford all three of his divorces.
ALICE: That's success.
Al comes and he and Flo hit it off; she asks Mel if she can take the day off to go swimming with Al.
MEL: Nobody swims on a workday.
VERA: Except a salmon.
(Everyone stares at her in wonder)
VERA: A salmon goes upstream to lay her eggs, so she's certainly swimming on a workday.
MEL: Well, if Flo wants to swim upstream to lay her eggs, FINE. Otherwise, FORGET IT.
FLO: Mel KISS MAH GRITS!!!
The next day, Flo and Al announce they're going to be married. Bubba, one of Flo's beaus, overhears the announcement and is hurt.
BUBBA: I didn't even get a Dear John letter.
VERA: That's because your name is Bubba.
BUBBA (to Flo) : I've known you so many years---it may take me a minute or two to get over ya.
FLO: Thanks a lot. We're planning to have our wedding on Sunday.
BUBBA: Does that mean our date next Saturday night is OFF???
They talk about the wedding. Flo wants a preacher. "No more justice of the peace. I had three of them quickies---they don't seem to take." When asked about her dress, Flo announces that "I'm going to be a vision in white." All the men in the diner turn around and cry in unison: "WHITE??!!"
Flo asks Alice and Vera to be her bridesmaids.
VERA: You know me---always a bridesmaid but never a bridegroom.
Flo asks Bubba if he'll give her away. "Don't worry," he tells her, "I'll keep my mouth shut."
When Flo and Al fly off to make their plans, Mel turns to Alice:
MEL: What do you think?
ALICE: Did you see the POSEIDON ADVENTURE?
MEL: Yeah.
ALICE: This is a bigger disaster.
The day of the wedding (taking place in the diner, of course). Flo is scared. "I'm as nervous as a long-tail cat in a roomful of rockers." Two male guests talk:
GUEST #1: A wedding can't start without the bride.
HENRY: I wish MINE had.
The preacher calls for "the hapless---I mean, the happy---couple---who will be united in holy deadlock---uh, wedlock . . . " But Flo has something to say to Al first:
FLO: I've got cold feet.
AL: Oh, baby I can get use to THAT.
Sudenly the episode takes a turn for the serious:
FLO: Al, I been thinkin' . . .
AL: Honey, this is no time to think . . . we're about to be married.
FLO: You just said the story of my life in two sentences. I never did THINK before I got married. The first time I was just a wild kid, the second time I was on the rebound, and the third time I was . . . tryin' to recapture my youth. Al, honey, you and I are good friends and I'd hate for our marriage to come between us.
Meanwhile, the preacher is getting nervous: "We really must get started. I have a disco lesson at two P.M."
But Flo and Al are gone. "We're calling off the wedding," reads the note that they left, "and going on the honeymoon instead."
Everyone celebrates and the credits roll over the picture as Flo and Al peek in the window to make sure everyone's having a good time at their wedding.
Wisecracking, man-chasing Flo was clearly the favorite on the show and in fact was rewarded with a sitcom of her own, a midseason replacement during the 1979-1980 season. Actress Polly Holliday, who played Flo, was delighted with her sudden stardom. Hers was a slow road to success, after more than ten years of regional and Off-Broadway work and occasional movie roles (Dustin Hoffman, who directed her in ALL OVER TOWN on Broadway in 1970, later remembered her when he was filming ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, in which she appeared.)
Flo changed Holliday's life. Until ALICE, there'd never been much demand for her Southern accent, which she'd worked hard at losing during her drama school days. But when she auditioned for Flo, she put the accent back on---and got the part. She said that she was rarely recognized in public because she never wore her Flo wig (Flo was a redhead; Holliday was blonde).
When Flo left Mel's Diner for the show of her own, the producers were looking for a new character to take up the comedic slack left by Holliday's absence---and they hired Diane Ladd, the actress who had played Flo in the movie ALICE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE. (Vic Tayback also carried over his role of Mel from the film.) Said Holliday: "I have every intention of making FLO work as a long-running series. But even if it doesn't succeed, I won't want to return to ALICE. It's like leaving the nest. Once you do, you don't go back."
One of the things Lavin missed about the difference between the sitcom and the film was that, well, Alice doesn't sing here anymore (except for the show's theme song). Said Lavin: "The original concept of the show was that Alice would do some singing, play the local Ramada Inn, but concepts changed. The network thought the singing dream was too frustrating to work on, and that people wouldn't want to sit and listen to somebody in a sitcom sing for five minutes. But John Rich, one of the writers on the series, told me that 'So you won't sing on the show. You'll sing on other people's shows.' And he's right."
ALICE was always predictable. We knew exactly what kind of jokes were coming and whom they'd be coming from (the nature of the sitcom game, unfortunately). But that could be overlooked on ALICE, whereas it couldn't be ignored on some of her contemporaries like HAPPY DAYS and THREE'S COMPANY, where the cheap jokes and pokes were said for their own sake. ALICE's humor didn't strive for the high of a M*A*S*H or a TAXI, where every one-liner told you ten things about the person who said it. But underneath ALICE's sometimes corny jokes and slapstick routines (one of the show's writers, incidentally, was Arthur Marx, Groucho's son), there was something on the show that was missing from so many sitcoms: compassion. ALICE shows us how Mel, a guy from Brooklyn, and Flo, a gal from Cowtown, and Alice, a woman from New Jersey, and Vera, a girl from---outer space?---could get together and---well, be each other's FAMILIES. And that was the important underlying message of ALICE---that friends are the new family. And what a long step that was from OZZIE and HARRIET, which told us (without ever telling us) to be kind and respectful and considerate of the people whom we're sentenced to live with by birth (even if we didn't like them). Shows like ALL IN THE FAMILY (which would have---and possibly DID---give old Ozzie a coronary) went on to upset the sitcom structure of family life. But ALICE went one step beyond: that you can feel warm and familial with someone who'd tell you to . . . well, to KISS MY GRITS!
ALICE was one of those shows where, if the main character had gotten what she wanted, if she'd been able to fulfill her dream, then there wouldn't have been any more show. Alice Hyatt wanted to be a singer. But, in the meantime, she worked as a waitress in Mel's Diner. She was a good singer---oh, how did we know? Well, we heard her performing the show's title tune each week: "There's a new world out there . . ."
But still, what made Alice different from her long-lost sitcom sisters is that Alice had a job, but longed for a career. The others in the TV job market---Suzie McNamera, Miss Brooks, Schultzy, et al.---all held jobs until they could find a man to hold.
Still, in many ways, ALICE was just like everything else on television during the late seventies. It had the sight gags and the silly jokes and the sassy allusions to sex---low humor---but it had two things that made it a hit: good acting and a good concept. Whether the American public realized it or not, the subliminal message of ALICE was that Sisterhood Is Powerful. It was Flo and Vera and Alice all the way. There was a loyalty that existed between them, a support system that, week after week, no matter what the trial, no matter what the tribulation, couldn't be shaken. Although their personalities were all different (and sometimes bizarre), they always stuck together---through loneliness, through crises, and through their ill-fated relationships with men. There was a true affection among the three of them. They were sort of the women's auxiliary of the M*A*S*H doctors, only their battlefield was Mel's Diner, run by the tough (but tender), cranky Mel.
It all came from a movie (which was not a comedy) called ALICE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE, all about a New Mexico widow who takes her son and moves to Phoenix in search of a singing career. What she finds instead is a job at a diner, a job at raising her son, and a job at working out a relationship with a guy she's met (Ellen Burstyn and Kris Kristofferson played Alice and her beau.)
ALICE was as abbreviated from the concept of the movie as its title was. The premise was basically the same---she landed in Phoenix, but came from New Jersey (and sounded like it)---but she never met Kris Kristofferson, although she had lots of other mismatched relationships.
Her two co-workers consisted of a loudmouthed, raunchy, softy of an old hand waitress named Flo, and a dingdong, timid waitress named Vera. The premiere dialogue went like this:
ALICE: My husband's been dead six months and some life insurance company is still trying to sell him a policy.
VERA: When was his birthday?
ALICE: September seventeenth.
VERA: Oh, a Virgo. That's a good sign. Robust and healthy. Ooops. Sorry, Alice.
MEL: You mean he never had a policy?
ALICE: Never. Don didn't believe in insurance.
MEL: How come?
ALICE: It didn't come in a six-pack.
FLO (to Mel) : If it did, you'd be the most overinsured man in the world.
MEL: Keep it up, Flo, and you're gonna get one from column A and one from column B.
FLO: Mel---kiss mah grits!
Of the three, Flo was the most colorful. What came out of her brain came out of her mouth. Some examples:
FLO: If Mel doesn't give us a raise soon, I'm gonna have to swallow my pride and marry that Texas millionaire.
ALICE: What Texas millionaire?
FLO: The first one that asks me.
And when one of her gentleman friends comes into the diner for breakfast:
FLO: Earl, honey, what would you like this morning?
EARL: The same thing I had last night.
Brassy and sassy, her favorite expressions were "Kiss mah grits," "When donkeys fly," and "You bet your sweet patoot." But it was her blue humor---baby blue, to be sure---that got her the most laughs. "You ought to see my new bikini," she once announced. "It came in a plain brown wrapper."
Once Mel asked her to carry in a sack of sugar. "If I'm gonna get a bad back," Flo caws, "it's not gonna be from lifting sugar."
Vera, on the other hand, probably would get a bad back from lifting sugar. But the real question is: where did she get such a bad brain?
MEL: I'm gonna live on easy street.
VERA: You mean you're giving up your apartment?
Or:
MEL: I'm a humanitarian.
VERA: Mel, you've never been in church a day of your life.
And:
HENRY: We love the ambience of Mel's Diner.
CUSTOMER: What's ambience?
VERA: That's what they pick you up in after you've eaten Mel's food.
And she wasn't kidding.
Later in the series, Vera became less stupid and more innocent (i.e., she said the same idiotic things, but the motivations were different. So she became dizzy instead of dumb).
Besides Vera's lame brain and Flo's sex life, Mel's cooking was the main source of jokes on the show. Here are some of the bad food jokes (that is, good jokes about bad food . . . and sometimes bad jokes about bad food; the bad food remained the constant on ALICE):
MEL (about to retire) : One more hour and my cooking days are over.
FLO: Your cooking days were over the day you attacked that stove.
MEL: Stow it, Flo.
FLO: You know, Mel, the doctors of Phoenix oughta get together and stop you from retiring---they're gonna lose a fortune.
When the jokes subsided, it was Linda Lavin, as Alice, who kept the show together. She was part of a new breed of sitcom heroines. Not the silly ones who did wacky things like Lucy or Margie or Gracie. Nor was she like the sitcom mommies of the fifties and early sixties---Margaret Anderson, Donna Reed, Harriet Nelson. Plus, she wasn't an Edith Bunker or a Maude Findlay, one of the larger-than-life ladies. She was somewhere between Mary Richards and Ann Romano; she was a reactor. She didn't do dumb things. She was sensible and calm; Lavin was generous enough as an actress to bring out the humor in the people around her. Sort of the litmus0paper performer.
Lavin was a little anxious about taking the part of Alice, at first, because Ellen Burstyn, who'd won an Academy Award for the movie version, was so firmly embedded in audience's minds. But she turned Alice into her own character---warm and witty and knowing. Her Broadway experience and her guest shots on other sitcoms (as well as a year as detective Janice Wentworth on BARNEY MILLER in 1975) all paid off on ALICE, which could have been a thankless acting job. Alice went about solving everybody else's problems---it could have been retitled GO ASK ALICE---and intervening in their crises. Plus sitting back and smiling while other people around her got the big laughs.
But not always. Sometimes Alice did say some funny things herself (though different from the mindless mouthings of the other characters).
TOMMY (Alice's son, who wants her to take a job singing) : If you didn't have me, I bet you'd say "Yes" just like that.
ALICE: That's why I have you---because I said "Yes" just like that.
Very often, ALICE---like so many other sitcoms of the era---was guilty of that school of sitcom writing called Fill-In-the-Blank Dialogue. Pick a subject, any subject, and the writers could come up with predictable jokes. The subject for the week, one week, was: Marriage. Flo, who'd been married three times, was going to marry Mel's brother Al, who'd also been married three times. Here is some of the dialogue that took place on that episode:
CUSTOMER: I didn't know you had a brother, Mel.
MEL: Yeah---he's a little younger than me.
VERA: That's because Mel was born before him.
MEL: My brother's coming here to forget his alimony. He's doing so well in the used car business, he can afford all three of his divorces.
ALICE: That's success.
Al comes and he and Flo hit it off; she asks Mel if she can take the day off to go swimming with Al.
MEL: Nobody swims on a workday.
VERA: Except a salmon.
(Everyone stares at her in wonder)
VERA: A salmon goes upstream to lay her eggs, so she's certainly swimming on a workday.
MEL: Well, if Flo wants to swim upstream to lay her eggs, FINE. Otherwise, FORGET IT.
FLO: Mel KISS MAH GRITS!!!
The next day, Flo and Al announce they're going to be married. Bubba, one of Flo's beaus, overhears the announcement and is hurt.
BUBBA: I didn't even get a Dear John letter.
VERA: That's because your name is Bubba.
BUBBA (to Flo) : I've known you so many years---it may take me a minute or two to get over ya.
FLO: Thanks a lot. We're planning to have our wedding on Sunday.
BUBBA: Does that mean our date next Saturday night is OFF???
They talk about the wedding. Flo wants a preacher. "No more justice of the peace. I had three of them quickies---they don't seem to take." When asked about her dress, Flo announces that "I'm going to be a vision in white." All the men in the diner turn around and cry in unison: "WHITE??!!"
Flo asks Alice and Vera to be her bridesmaids.
VERA: You know me---always a bridesmaid but never a bridegroom.
Flo asks Bubba if he'll give her away. "Don't worry," he tells her, "I'll keep my mouth shut."
When Flo and Al fly off to make their plans, Mel turns to Alice:
MEL: What do you think?
ALICE: Did you see the POSEIDON ADVENTURE?
MEL: Yeah.
ALICE: This is a bigger disaster.
The day of the wedding (taking place in the diner, of course). Flo is scared. "I'm as nervous as a long-tail cat in a roomful of rockers." Two male guests talk:
GUEST #1: A wedding can't start without the bride.
HENRY: I wish MINE had.
The preacher calls for "the hapless---I mean, the happy---couple---who will be united in holy deadlock---uh, wedlock . . . " But Flo has something to say to Al first:
FLO: I've got cold feet.
AL: Oh, baby I can get use to THAT.
Sudenly the episode takes a turn for the serious:
FLO: Al, I been thinkin' . . .
AL: Honey, this is no time to think . . . we're about to be married.
FLO: You just said the story of my life in two sentences. I never did THINK before I got married. The first time I was just a wild kid, the second time I was on the rebound, and the third time I was . . . tryin' to recapture my youth. Al, honey, you and I are good friends and I'd hate for our marriage to come between us.
Meanwhile, the preacher is getting nervous: "We really must get started. I have a disco lesson at two P.M."
But Flo and Al are gone. "We're calling off the wedding," reads the note that they left, "and going on the honeymoon instead."
Everyone celebrates and the credits roll over the picture as Flo and Al peek in the window to make sure everyone's having a good time at their wedding.
Wisecracking, man-chasing Flo was clearly the favorite on the show and in fact was rewarded with a sitcom of her own, a midseason replacement during the 1979-1980 season. Actress Polly Holliday, who played Flo, was delighted with her sudden stardom. Hers was a slow road to success, after more than ten years of regional and Off-Broadway work and occasional movie roles (Dustin Hoffman, who directed her in ALL OVER TOWN on Broadway in 1970, later remembered her when he was filming ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, in which she appeared.)
Flo changed Holliday's life. Until ALICE, there'd never been much demand for her Southern accent, which she'd worked hard at losing during her drama school days. But when she auditioned for Flo, she put the accent back on---and got the part. She said that she was rarely recognized in public because she never wore her Flo wig (Flo was a redhead; Holliday was blonde).
When Flo left Mel's Diner for the show of her own, the producers were looking for a new character to take up the comedic slack left by Holliday's absence---and they hired Diane Ladd, the actress who had played Flo in the movie ALICE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE. (Vic Tayback also carried over his role of Mel from the film.) Said Holliday: "I have every intention of making FLO work as a long-running series. But even if it doesn't succeed, I won't want to return to ALICE. It's like leaving the nest. Once you do, you don't go back."
One of the things Lavin missed about the difference between the sitcom and the film was that, well, Alice doesn't sing here anymore (except for the show's theme song). Said Lavin: "The original concept of the show was that Alice would do some singing, play the local Ramada Inn, but concepts changed. The network thought the singing dream was too frustrating to work on, and that people wouldn't want to sit and listen to somebody in a sitcom sing for five minutes. But John Rich, one of the writers on the series, told me that 'So you won't sing on the show. You'll sing on other people's shows.' And he's right."
ALICE was always predictable. We knew exactly what kind of jokes were coming and whom they'd be coming from (the nature of the sitcom game, unfortunately). But that could be overlooked on ALICE, whereas it couldn't be ignored on some of her contemporaries like HAPPY DAYS and THREE'S COMPANY, where the cheap jokes and pokes were said for their own sake. ALICE's humor didn't strive for the high of a M*A*S*H or a TAXI, where every one-liner told you ten things about the person who said it. But underneath ALICE's sometimes corny jokes and slapstick routines (one of the show's writers, incidentally, was Arthur Marx, Groucho's son), there was something on the show that was missing from so many sitcoms: compassion. ALICE shows us how Mel, a guy from Brooklyn, and Flo, a gal from Cowtown, and Alice, a woman from New Jersey, and Vera, a girl from---outer space?---could get together and---well, be each other's FAMILIES. And that was the important underlying message of ALICE---that friends are the new family. And what a long step that was from OZZIE and HARRIET, which told us (without ever telling us) to be kind and respectful and considerate of the people whom we're sentenced to live with by birth (even if we didn't like them). Shows like ALL IN THE FAMILY (which would have---and possibly DID---give old Ozzie a coronary) went on to upset the sitcom structure of family life. But ALICE went one step beyond: that you can feel warm and familial with someone who'd tell you to . . . well, to KISS MY GRITS!