Anything I Want?

My Dad was purging the stuff he's accumulated in decades upon decades of garage sales, thrift stores, impulse buys, etc. He's where I get my pack rat tendencies, no doubt.

He tries to pare down the accumulated loot, but he doesn't really want to. It's easier if he only sort of gets rid of something by giving it to me. This way it is still in reach in the event that it is an item he should have kept.

Since I'm a bit of a foodie, he asked me if I wanted some cookbooks, and I accepted a box of them. With my Dad's books you just never know what you'll find.

I remember once in late grade school (probably 5th or 6th grade) he caught me reading Candy by Terry Southern. I hadn't gotten very far into it, and I was honestly bored and about to give it up. Until Dad freaked out and demanded to know what I thought I was doing reading that. I showed him that it was marked as all his paperbacks were with his last name in magic marker on the edge of the sheets. so that if you looked at it from any angle but the spine it was obviously his.

He also, in confiscating it, guaranteed I'd read it sooner or later. Funny book, not as good as The Magic Christian, but on the whole better than Flash & Filigree.


Anyway, one person I'm pretty sure never got around to reading any Terry Southern was my Dad. But that's not what I came here to talk to you about...AHEM.



In this box of cookbooks, there was the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company Cookbook, Rodale's Basic Natural Foods, some local cookbooks. Then I found pay dirt: The Alice's Restaurant Cookbook by Alice May Brock, the real-life hippie chick who inspired Arlo Guthrie's most famous song.



It's a pretty pedestrian set of recipes, your basic comfort foods, mingled with a lot of hippie bullshit, pot-influenced folk wisdom and tragic late-sixties typography.



Fun stuff, in other words. Has a tear-out record in the back with a 'recorded intro' by Arlo and Alice.



I got curious and looked on eBay and Amazon to see what this little item fetches. I smell collectible, right?

Right. Depending on condition, I found them ranging from $15 to $90. Here's one with the dust jack (I don't have that) for an opening bid of $40.



So I could sell this one, right? Nope, not gonna happen. I'd regret it before I even got the auction under way.



I even took the extra step to devalue it as a collectible: I listened to the record. It was still attached in the back of the book, but you can't find out what's on it that way. And it ain't on iTunes as far as I can tell.



So here, if you have a mint copy and don't want to tear out the record, you can listen to my crappy little video of the record playing.

Intro to Alice's Restaurant Cookbook from Chixulub on Vimeo.

Anyway, I can get anything I want?  Anything?