For Alice Brock's memorial gathering

This was read aloud at the event, so it's not fully written out, but you get the gist.

Nov 2, 2025

I’m Jim Cruz -Youll. My husband Brandon and I are here from San Francisco, and humbled to spend this sliver of time with so many of Alice’s long-time friends.

I wondered if it would be ok to mention the song.

Alice was a chef, an artist, an author, a cat masseur, an altruist, a woman, a friend.

You worry about turning a person into a sort of mascot or cartoon.

But I don’t think it’s like that. Our family and friends in Ohio, in Boston, in San Francisco, Minneapolis, Virginia, Denver, Juneau, Alaska… knew OF Alice from a song, though they didn’t KNOW Alice personally. But they send love through us today to you all and to the real Alice. They know about her bigger life. They have her art and her books. When Alice’s admirers around the world donated to Dini’s fundraiser a few Thanksgivings ago, they left enough grateful messages to fill a twenty-page book we made for Alice so she could hold all that love in her own hands.

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I first met Alice through a song, too.

When I was a kid, the Vietnam War dominated the news. My parents subscribed to Time, Life, and Look magazines plus three daily newspapers which I read cover to cover - and that’s why I grew up hating war.

… mom also subscribed to Good Housekeeping - which is why I grew up gay… We can come back to that another time.

As far as I know, I was the only kid in my high school class of three hundred to register as a conscientious objector to the draft, complete with a file and a priest-counselor… I wore a POW/MIA bracelet for S. Sgt Ronald Stanton of Massillon, Ohio - near where I grew up. He died in Vietnam on Oct 20, 1968, the day before his 22nd birthday.

So I thank Alice /the icon/ on behalf of myself and all the once-young men who still believe in peace. When we found the song she inspired, we learned that resisting the draft and demanding peace is a /thing/ you can do.

A person is not a song. But without Alice being who and how she was, there wouldn’t have been a story. No story, no song. No song, no lesson for us all about rejecting war.

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When I moved to Provincetown, townies told me nobody since the Pilgrims came to the end of the continent by mistake. There are two ways to end up there. Spirits like Alice migrated intentionally because they knew it was Home. Others, like me, were running away from something. It’s safe there behind the inner harbor, far from the world. They call us wash-ashores.

I think in Alice’s view, no matter how someone comes into our lives, we’re all wash-ashores in one way or another… and that’s okay.

I finally met the real Alice my first summer in Provincetown at her house and studio on Commercial Street, behind the sign on the arrow that read simply “ART” pointing at her front door.

That winter, I helped my friend Danny dig Alice’s car out of a three-foot snow bank at the top of Bradford Street and thought “maybe I’m a townie now.”

When Brandon and I married in Provincetown, Alice was our flower girl. It was a beautiful day for /January/ on the Cape, but Alice wasn’t well enough to come to the ceremony so we took flowers to her at home afterward and received her private blessing. She gave our marriage an auspicious start.

We loved dinners out with Alice, where we were too loud and had too much wine and too much fun but never got kicked out. I’m proud that a famous chef genuinely liked my chocolate chip cookies, and glad we found opportunities to send them to her.

Alice Brock was our beloved friend who continues to inspire good in more people than she would ever acknowledge. We’re grateful to have been a small part of her big life, we love her… we miss her.

Thank you, Alice.