Remember Alice’s Restaurant?

This is gonna date me, but here goes…

In Arlo Guthrie’s 1970s song ‘Alice’s Restaurant’, he croons a story of some hippies who had a Thanksgiving Dinner and then jettisoned the trash over a cliff to the dump, where they thought it should go. Consequently they were arrested and hauled into the police station thanks to an envelope found at the bottom of the pile, which bore the name and address of those doing the dumping.

While Guthrie’s song may have been an exaggeration for the benefit of parody, for Gary Coleman of South Carolina, this situation again became a reality.

As he walked along the sidewalk opening mail, (this makes him a pedestrian, no?) he tossed the envelope in the trash. Later he received a notice from the city which stated he’d “violated a City of Charleston Ordinance — the unlawful use Of city-maintained baskets.”

The City’s Public Service Department said they were not trash cans, rather litter receptacles meant to catch discarded items from pedestrians who have no other option.

The man was a pedestrian, and this was ONE envelope, not the day’s office trash. Huh?

Man ticketed for tossing trash learns city cans are for pedestrians

Just for kicks, here is the song ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ which I played over and over again on the coffee house circuit in the 1960s and 1970s..

And here is a clip of the original….

Update! Arlo Guthrie is a Republican?