This week I saw a PBS documentary about Woody Allen. The man is a genius, comic and otherwise. In fact, he’s more than that. I truly believe he’s the Garrison Keillor of Manhattan, where all of the women work out to be strong, all of the men assume they are good-looking and 32% of the children are above average.
I am now a long-devoted Woodyphile, but it took a 1,500-mile move to get him.
Everything about Woody Allen clashes with the starched upper Midwest. In a notable cosmic oversight, that’s where I was raised, even though my father was from New York, where my grandfather owned delicatessens and my great-grandfather, his zeyde, brewed his own Passover wine. My father’s bedtime stories were about his boyhood escapades in Sheepshead Bay and invisible trains that run under the streets. My Dad, Sam, was Brooklyn-handsome, with dark, curly hair and a slick way on the dance floor.
If you’re from west of the Mississippi, you’ve got plenty to complain about, believe you me. There’s the wind-chill; the accents that make Easterners subtract 17 points from your IQ the minute ya, you betcha slips out; the absence of landscaping and cynicism between Minnesota and Montana; mosquitoes as big as bagels; the fact that by the time you break through your reserve to be friendly, the party is over; and the underlying fear that you’ll end up in a wood chipper. But you don’t whine, for cripes’ sake. Nor do you develop a fixation on Ingmar Bergman, which you’re pretty sure was the name of your biology teacher. You might not have steamed a lobster until you were 25, but even if you had, you’d buck up if the bag broke. You probably wore funny glasses, but not on purpose.
If you were Jewish, like I am, you nonetheless drank a glass of milk with every meal, including the brisket. The high school guys you dated had last names like Peterson, Anderson, and Olson, and some became Lutheran ministers. You might have had very curly hair, but you never knew it, because you set it on rollers like all your friends.
I went east to college, all the way to Wisconsin. When my boyfriend visited my hometown, my mother turned weirdly ethnic, throwing around words like schlep and drek and joking about all the verbrente Republicans, although she politely defined the Yiddish for him, on the chance that a guy from a Long Island town with six synagogues had never heard these words. Back in Wisconsin, it was this boyfriend who took me to seemy first Woody Allen movie, where he cracked up at lines like, “I knew I was in love. First of all, I was very nauseous,”along with a theater full of other homesick New Yorkers. I stared, stony-faced, at the screen, wondering what was causing the hilarity beyond a guy playing a cello in a marching band.
Living in New York City, of course, changed everything. I moved to a neighborhood full of curly-haired people, not a blonde, blue-eyed Norske within miles. One day, after I got rained on and rotini-ringlets emerged all over my head, my boyfriend convinced me to go native and leave my ‘do that way. I started hearing Yiddish everywhere, even from--especially from--Southern Baptists at work who liked to work mischegas into a sentence. I learned what a schmeer was, how to order smoked salmon at Zabars and call it Nova, carried a bag, not a purse, and drank soda, not pop. Once when I was walking along Broadway, a Chasidic gentleman--peyes, black hat, the whole bit--tried to pick me up with the line, “Cookele, vant to have lunch?” When “Annie Hall” hit the screen in 1977, I still might have been very la-di-da, la-di-da, with a grandmother who subscribed to The Atlantic, but as Alvy Singer said, “My grammy never gave me gifts. She was too busy getting raped by Cossacks,” I howled along with all the other Upper West Siders.
Woody Allen, you should live to 120.
Sally Koslow is the author of three novels, most recently With Friends like These. In June, her first non-fiction book will be published by Viking: Slouching Toward Adulthood: Observations from the Not-So-Empty , which explores the lives of people in their 20's and 30's. She invites you to visit her website: www.sallykoslow.com and to follow her on Twitter: @sallykoslow.
