When asked  what she "wished for", she would say “"to be 75 again".” Ask her what she thought about her incredible popularity at age 89; "They better get me before I’m gone".” Her nephew in Birmingham called her a cross between Grandma Moses and Phyllis Diller. Her son Tim called her a "star". “I’m somewhat of a ham,” Alice admitted. “"I put on a show".” A show that attracted visitors to her home in Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi, and sent them home with her art for 11 years.

Neatly dressed for the stream of guests dropping by her living room to pick through prints, she kept her white hair swept under a beret (she claimed she did not have time to comb it anymore). Her lightly rouged lips revealed an easy smile, and they were always ready to drop the next one-liner. “I’m not a little old lady with a weekend hobby,” she would say, all in good humor. “This is not just a hobby.” Full of detail and message, her portraits capturing life in the South make you think, laugh, even lament. Her work “The House Is Blue but the Old Lady Ain’t” sums up her life in her own shotgun house along the Gulf Coast, where she moved in 1988 from Plum Point, Mississippi. She’s won numerous awards for her art, even though she did not take up painting until age 60 while she cared for her terminally ill mother. Before that, she had only dabbled in china painting.

“If my Mom had not been ill, I never would’ve painted,” Alice said. “I think of it as her gift to me.” Alice on Retirement: “People think it’s some great secret that I’m working at age 89,” she stated. “You have to have a reason to get up. I wake up and read the obituaries. If my name’s not in them, I get up and get dressed.” Alice on Life:“No one’s promised me immortality, but I’m beginning to wonder,” she quips. Alice on Aging: After her 89th birthday in December of 1999, she immediately started talking about the next one. “Ninety is just so much more impressive than 89,” she said. Alice still painted every day, that is if there wasn't a school group coming over; if she was not attending a social function or entertaining a bus-load of tourists from New Jersey.

 “When I stop painting you’ll know my work’s deteriorated,” she said. “I’ll know when to stop.” Nothing’s deteriorated. When she picked up a paintbrush she maintained the steadiness of a surgeon. Although she’s battled high blood pressure for years, she even managed to turn that into a chuckle: “If you’ve got any blood pressure at all at this age it’s gotta be a good sign.”