B is for Bagdad Cafe

Week B | Monday | I’m calling you

“A desert road from Vegas to nowhere

Someplace better than where you’ve been

A coffee machine that needs some fixing

In a little cafe just around the bend”

I was so sure I’d posted about this before, but a swift search of this Substack says no, so here we go. I want to recommend this 1987 film directed by Percy Adlon, if you haven’t already seen it. You should be able to find it fairly easily, still. Fantastic cast, great style, strange, compassionate, and hypnotic. I think it’s among the very best American road movies. And the theme song by Jevetta Steele is lovely and haunting.

During my 38-state tour of the US in 2003, I was in the South somewhere; Hot Springs, Arkansas, I think? I’d seen and loved Bagdad Cafe when it first came out, but hadn’t thought about it in years, despite now being on an American road trip myself. So it felt like fate when I came across a DVD of it for a dollar, knowing I had a DVD player in my MacBook. I got some snacks in and had a great evening rewatching it.

A few months later I was driving a rental car from Barstow to Needles on Interstate 40 through the western Mojave Desert of California, closely parallel to Route 66. And I so nearly missed it. I wasn’t driving all that fast. But my mind didn’t clock it until I was already past it. A weathered sign, hand-painted, if I recall it right. BAGDAD CAFE.

I don’t think you could see the cafe itself from the interstate. The sign was on its lonesome, closer to possible customers in traffic. A siren call. I found the next possible turnoff to transfer to the smaller, older, slower, rougher, globally famous road, then drove back on myself, on Route 66.

Of course I sang the tune, the few lines I know. Aren’t you, now?

And there it was. I was staggered. Chills.

I was the only customer. I met the lovely, wounded, resilient owner, Andrea Pruitt. She told me stories of Hollywood from the life of her handsome son, before his demise. How he’d been close to Natalie Wood’s daughter. She told me tales from the set of the film that bore her cafe’s name.

Though it was the Sidewinder Cafe from around 1950 and only became the Bagdad Cafe in 1992 – so actually the film named it. But it spawned the film. What happened is that Percy Adlon and his producer wife Eleanor took a Route 66 road trip in 1984, and came across a small roadside diner near Barstow, which Gave Them Ideas. They renamed the Sidewinder for the film after the ghost town of Bagdad, 50 miles away.

Andrea let me go behind the counter and pour a coffee. Not from that yellow flask, that iconic object from the film, though it was there. I touched it. I took some photos of the place and its guardian but they’re not in great shape now.

There was a letter on the wall, not even framed I think, from a woman who expressed how dazed and delighted she was to actually be in the place of something she’d loved so much for so long. Renee Zellweger was no less a pilgrim than me, and thousands of others from all over the world. An odd, raggedy shrine, really. But a shrine it is.

And this is its High Priestess. Or was. I learned in researching this today that the kind and generous “desert icon” died in January of this year, aged 85. She had been talked into buying the cafe by her husband in 1995. Its future is unclear. Perhaps Renee Zellweger could buy it, so pilgrims can continue to “feel the magic” for all eternity.

That photo of Andrea is from Route 66 Road Relics, a great place to explore (what remains of) the road. Big Mike recommends that you watch the film, too. As he puts it:

“It’s a reminder that sometimes the best adventures are the ones you don’t expect, and that the most memorable places are often the ones that are a little rough around the edges.”

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