Chris Orcutt, Writer

I'm not sure why, but I do. I have a thing for Alices.

A little self-psychoanalysis here. I think my interest in Alices started as a child, when I first read Alice in Wonderland. I remember being a boy and admiring this cool girl and her amazing adventures and all of the great lines she had.

Years later, as an undergraduate philosophy major, in a course on logical fallacies, we read Lewis Carroll's story again, and I was even more amazed by the playful, brilliant mind of Alice. Here are just a few of her better lines:

"Curiouser and curiouser!"

"It was much pleasanter at home, when one wasn't always growing larger and smaller, and being ordered about by mice and rabbits."

"It would be so nice if something made sense for a change."

"If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?"

Then at some point as a child I saw the movie, and I remember being spellbound by Alice's hair and eyes. I'm quite sure that these features of hers, beyond her clever brain, are why she has been so popular among little girls for generations.

Women everywhere have forever wondered, "What
product is this bitch using to get a sheen like that?"

Boy or girl, how could you not fall in love with Alice?

Okay, so now it's back to college for the next Alice. Two Alices, actually.

While going to school in Boston, besides my share of girlfriends, I had three gal-pals. The great thing about gal-pals when you're a heterosexual guy is that your respect for them and your enjoyment of their company outweighs your desire to sleep with them. Billy Crystal's character in When Harry Met Sally is right when he says, "You pretty much want to nail them, too," but again, you quell this desire in the interest of friendship.

Even though the first two aren't Alices, I'd like to mention them. Number one was a woman named Kate, a pallid, goth-ish English major with a wonderfully wry sense of humor. And Margie was the second—a Southern belle (Georgia, land of Scarlett O'Hara) and fellow philosophy major. Since I was a multi-generational New Englander, we clashed beautifully. Margie and I loved to argue; we'd go to movies together and afterwards argue about the film, go to the MFA together and argue about the paintings, go for coffee at the ERC and argue about that, too. Last I heard, she's now a successful lawyer in Phoenix. You go, girl!

And then there was Alice, who was something of a bad influence.

Daisy Buchanan's on Newbury St. in Boston: Where
Alice and I tore it up many an afternoon.

Alice loved alcohol as much as I did, and senior year she frequently talked me into cutting class so we could go drinking. We drank Bud at Fenway, G&Ts at Daisy Buchanan's on Newbury Street, Murphy's Irish Red at Tommy Doyle's in Cambridge, Bushmills Irish Whiskey at my apartment while listening to The Doors, and, three or four times (I forget—I was drunk), Stoli shots at The Foxy Lady, a strip club in Providence, RI. (Alice was either bisexual or an undeclared lesbian. Characteristically coy, she would never say.)

To this day, I don't remember how we got to Providence and back; I think Alice drove, and probably while drunk at that. I ended up using Alice as the prototype for the femme fatale in my novel A REAL PIECE OF WORK. I considered briefly naming her Alice, as my homage to the original hell-raiser, but I went with Shay Connolly instead.

Another Alice that stirred my imagination in college appeared in the 35th Anniversary Edition of Playboy. Her name is Alice Denham, and she was the July 1956 Playmate.

Once again, however, it was more than her looks that interested me. Yes, she was a gorgeous redhead, and yes she had a figure that could make a blind man weep. But she was also a talented writer and the only woman, says Publishers Weekly, "whose fiction and breasts have appeared in the same issue."

Thank God we can't say the same of Norman Mailer.

Alice Denham, working on a story in her bare feet. HOT!

Alice, looking over her work. Two major turn-ons
for me: a hot woman in a pickup truck, and
a hot literary woman at a typewriter.

Alice Denham wrote other work, too, including a widely praised novel, My Darling from the Lions. She wrote for television for years, and recently she came out with a "kiss-and-tell" memoir entitled Sleeping with Bad Boys, in which she dishes the dirt on all of the literary and film stars of the fifties.

I really shouldn't be speaking of her in the past tense because, to my knowledge, she still writes and does readings in New York City from time to time. Alice, if you're out there and reading this, I'd love to meet you—maybe at a reading of my own in the future.

The final Alice for whom I've had a thing is the inimitable Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the unruly daughter of Theodore Roosevelt. Ever since I read this biography on Alice, I've had something of a crush on her.

Alice Roosevelt, TR's daughter, and
my love from another lifetime.

Alice Roosevelt was the original Paris Hilton, but
with an IQ 100 points higher and not at all slutty.

The woman was brilliant, witty, beautiful and irreverent. They named a color for her—Alice blue (similar to the color of postal uniforms). When her father forbade her from smoking cigarettes under the roof of the White House, she said, "Fine," and went up on the roof to smoke.

When TR was leaving office in 1909, she made a voodoo doll of Taft and buried it on the White House lawn. And while on a Far East good will delegation for her father, she acquired so much free loot from heads of state that one member of the party wrote a satirical poem called, "Alice in Plunderland".

And with that, my story of Alices has come full-circle. Why do I have a thing for Alices? I'm still not sure, but I enjoyed sharing this with you.

Here's to Alices everywhere.