Month: March 2021

(Nervous throat clearing) There was a time when I knew all the Woody Allen movies.  I have fond memories and have had a great many laughs from watching his golden period of comedy productions: “Play it again, Sam,” “Take the Money and Run,” “Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex,” “Love & Death,” “Sleeper,” “Annie Hall,” “Manhattan,” “Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy,” “Stardust Memories,” “Purple Rose of Cairo,” “Zelig,” “Hannah and her Sisters” “Radio Days,” “Alice,” “Mighty Aphrodite” and “Bullets Over Broadway.”  Quite an outstanding late 20^th century film repertoire, with homages to his beloved New York City in color and black and white, the music of Porter and Gershwin, and lots of witty jokes about s-e-x and his personal favorite musing and lifelong fear, death—the last two subjects the only things he believes in to paraphrase his character’s last line in “Sleeper.”  Come on, I was hardly alone in perceiving the little guy as a comedy genius, not necessarily sexy yet his movies afterwards seemed to cast a spell of lovemaking.

Before I knew anything about Woody Allen, other than his trademark unattractive black frame glasses and nervous comedy bits, there was a TV game show featuring a trio of celebrity couples.  In “Tattletales” the wives would answer questions, and their husbands guessed the answers then vice versa.  In a circa 1981 episode, the question for the ladies was “Who would you rather sleep with: Ronald Reagan or Woody Allen?”  The women, all seasoned actresses, answered hands down “Woody Allen.”  At the time, I could not fathom the two choices.

Reluctantly I’ve been watching HBO’s “Allen v Farrow” (an ironic title since it seems to be the other way around).  So now I’m confronted when recalling Allen’s movies with the mind of a much older woman and through the prerequisite 21^st century MeToo gaze.  There’s even a sick feeling when hearing a film expert, a former fan who purposely and thoroughly studied Allen’s body of work including nonpublished manuscripts, submits that the filmmaker habitually wrote about a young woman or a much younger female in love with or sheepishly pursuing Allen or an older man.  Guess Allen didn’t realize he couldn’t play 30 or 40 the rest of his life and get away with love scenes with women in their 20s, college girls, or like in “Manhattan” a high school student played then by 16-year-old Mariel Hemingway.

Casting perspective on a generation

When I first heard about the ugly ‘p’ word associated with Allen by his former lover and leading actress Mia Farrow, I didn’t know what to think.  The ‘p’ word became public rumor right after Farrow inadvertently discovered Allen was having an affair with her adopted teen-age daughter.  Farrow and Allen never lived together but kept separate New York apartments, not unlike ‘free floating life rafts’ to paraphrase a line by Allen in “Annie Hall,” which is said because his character did not want to live with his girlfriend Annie but wanted to continue their adult relationship while living separately.  The implication was Allen’s character, twice divorced like the actor in real life, was immature.

The ‘p’ bomb was dropped by Farrow regarding another adopted baby that Allen agreed to father.  The allegations are he had an ‘intense’ relationship with this one child, a curly haired baby girl.  Somehow in their unusually close relationship, allegedly a line was crossed—and there are witnesses including the now grown daughter herself.  She is adamant Allen on more than one occasion sexually abused her when she was a little girl.  Allen’s team of lawyers countered that the allegations were coached by Farrow in revenge for his admitted affair with her teenage daughter.

Someone bring me a martini, to paraphrase another classic Woody Allen movie line in response to a sordid romantic triangle in which his character finds himself.

The news died down when Allen was never charged with a crime, which it appears the HBO doc is implying should have occurred.  But the investigation was in the early 1990s.  We’re a more woke generation now in 2021.  We think we’re real, can see the ugly truth in everything, have reached the Age of No BS.

Still.  Like millions of former and closet Woody Allen fans, I do not know him.  There was a time I thought I’d come close to meeting him.  I was in NYC in December 1991 and planned to go to Michael’s Pub where I heard he played clarinet.  I called and found he plays on Monday nights, and I was there on a weekend.  Nevertheless, I shot pictures of the Big Apple in black and white film because of Woody Allen.  Two collages of pictures remain on my bathroom walls, perhaps exactly where they belong.

Through the years, I’ve occasionally caught an Allen movie on TCM usually around Oscar season or when they do a tribute to New York City or an era of fine comedy writers.  After all, Allen wrote for Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows” along with Mel Brooks and Neil Simon.  And like other fans, I admire the film work of art and comedy … but quietly ponder if Allen is just a dirty old man and should have gone to prison.

The Beautiful People   

When the story came out about his romance with Soon-Yi Previn, Farrow’s adopted teen daughter, any fan would think of “Manhattan.”  In the movie, his 40-something character wrestles with dating a high school girl.  With her fresh young face and girlish voice, she tells him she thinks she’s in love with him.  They have a chemistry, many things in common, as if she is more mature than her high school age and even wise beyond her years.  Yet he knows this relationship is, well, wrong.  He breaks up with her to date someone his age, but then that woman dumps him.  As creative therapy, his character records a list of things he loves.  The last thing he says to himself is the face of his former too-young girlfriend.  He thinks he screwed up dumping her and literally runs to get her back.  But it’s too late, and he has to accept it.

I also thought about other love interests in Allen’s movies and how their figures have always been slim and their appearance waifish.  In armchair psychoanalysis, I wonder if the writer is attracted to younger females, those who are not yet womanly in shape, have yet if ever developed a figure that says across the screen “Va-va-va-voom!  Now here’s a grown woman, no doubt about it.”  Mia Farrow and Diane Keaton, two of his co-stars and his former real-life girlfriends, were slim and trim and able to play younger women, not girls, for a couple of decades in Woody Allen movies.

The MeToo movement asks us to ignore the other side of an age-old story: Sometimes a young female thinks she’s in love with or, if more secure than insecure, goes after an older male.  Like it or not, this relationship (that we used to think was none of our business) has not only been the subject of art for centuries, it’s also common in life and coupling.  There is an age when a man should not date or pursue a female.  There is right and wrong, and the law makes it clear age wise.  But men have gone after younger females way before “Peyton Place.”  We even had a President who on more than one occasion dumped his aging wife for a younger model.  Men who can do.

Are we going to banish everyone who had anything to do with the older man and the younger female in real life and in works of fiction?  That would include Harrison Ford now and the director Stephen Spielberg.  Remember that scene in “Indiana Jones” where during one of Dr. Jones’ college lectures on anthropology, a female student bats her eyes closed with the legible words “Love You” painted on the lids?  Then there’s the storyline about Jones and his former dalliance with the daughter of a colleague.  The two former lovers meet up some years later in Nepal where she is still angry at him, telling him what he did was wrong and he knew it because she was just a child.  And Mr. Man tells her she knew what she was doing.  She wants an apology, and he apologizes.  Then she pushes for more remorse, and a put-out Indiana Jones responds he can say he’s sorry only so much.  The movie has a happy ending in that the two sorta get together, and we learn in a sequel made decades later they had a son.

It’s just so hard for me and maybe others to believe Woody Allen, the little weasel whose comedy centered on sex and romantic relationships, is a pedophile.  Then again, throughout his celebrity he notoriously shunned interviews and maintained a very private life.  What could have been his reason?  In his movies, his characters always make clear his disdain for the pretension of show business.

In the end Allen married Soon-Yi. They have been married a few decades and raised kids.  The couple lives and travels together as husband and wife.  They have indeed grown old together, contrary to the early Woody Allen movies when his characters doubted such a normal life possible because he was too neurotic.  Whether their love is real or their marriage a ploy to kill rumors about alleged depravity remains unknown.  Because none of us knows this man or any of these people.  Allen insists even in his end-of-life memoir that this girl Soon-Yi entered his life and eventually there was an attraction.  When all of this was blowing up in his face and nobody could believe the legendary Woody Allen was really in love with such a young girl who had absolutely nothing in common with him, having been a poor orphan across the world, he replied pitifully, “The heart wants what it wants.”

Somebody cue September Song—because that’s what I hear whenever reminiscing about a Woody Allen movie.  

After faithfully masking in public for a year now—well, now, ’cause we had to—Texans have been told it’s no longer mandated across the state.  “Yahoo!” was my first giddy reaction.  Then I started thinkin’ on it.  The news indicates Texas’ stats on the virus and related deaths are not coming down in an astounding turnabout of good luck.  And, yes, every day now many in droves are getting the vaccine including yours truly.  After my first dose, I was overwhelmed by a renewed sense of optimism, like I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.  I mean, PTL!  But I’ve never been one to separate modern medicine and religious faith.  They go hand in hand in my book.

The line for the vaccine, however, was unexpectedly long with hardly anyone paying attention to social distance markers except for me.  And then people actually butted in line, yes breaking right ahead of me.  They knew well I was there first, and still anxious individuals and couples just broke in line.  I must look like a push over, and I am to some extent but within seconds knew the score and toughened up with a look that said, “Try it, punk.”  The punks were senior citizens.  It was like everyone for himself, full panic mode.  And we were in line to get the long-awaited presumed life-saving societal normalizing VACCINE.

Walk the line

After slowly moving through the ever-expanding outdoor line to the hospital, still with newcomers darting in and out and breaking in front of attendants indoors who obviously avoided verbal altercation, it was my turn.  I showed my ID, got my temperature checked and met all the other screening questions.  Cleared, I was told to go to the gold elevators.  This must be like heaven.

No, just more winding lines upstairs.  The halls were lined with chairs where people waited ten minutes after their shot.  The shot room was large with maybe twenty stations where nurses screened us some more and went into detail about side effects and asked about allergies.  The shot was quick and painless.  I quickly removed myself from the crowded room and found an empty chair to wait any quick reactions.  Nada.  I left the overcrowded hospital doing its part to vaccine millions of Texans.  I don’t look forward to dealing with rude people when I return for my second dose.

So when the Governor proclaimed out of nowhere that Texas was removing the mask mandate, I wondered why.  Immediately came the counter: He did it to make us all happy and forget about the February deadly winter storm debacle.  Millions were out of heat, out of electricity and then out of water and facing insurmountable water damage from busted pipes.  What a multi-billion-dollar mess for state and local government not to mention our various electric businesses and of course the tens of thousands of Texans.

Behind the mask

We’re all thrilled down here in Texas to be told we don’t have to wear a mask if we don’t want to, that it should be an individual decision and certainly up to each individual business.  Right away, I noticed the list of mega stores like Target insisting the mask mandate would stick at least with employees.  I awaited Walmart, but they followed suit, too, and require masks.  Seems Big Business just yet will not ‘throw caution to the wind,’ shall we say?  Even major city mayors quickly countered the state’s no-mask mandate with a city mask mandate and public buildings’ mandate.  All right, already.

The thought of suddenly being mask free left me with mixed feelings.  I mean, the end is near, which is great, better than we were just a month ago.  We now know there will come a time perhaps even this year that we won’t have to wear masks everywhere we go.  For the most part, we don’t wear masks at home, in our cars, visiting relatives or anyone else indoors, and many of us never stopped going to restaurants and didn’t wear masks while eating with strangers though somewhat socially distanced.

Wearing a mask eight to nine hours a day at work taught me I cannot stand it and am so happy I didn’t go into the medical profession.  Wearing the mask has almost become a habit, basically a forced routine that even now I tend to forget and have to remind myself to mask up before entering public places.  I’ve kept a bag of fresh masks at work, in my car, a few in my purse.  I don’t wear it unless I absolutely have to.  And at work and just about anywhere I go, I’ll still have to wear a mask until further notice.

I thought after my second shot, I definitely wouldn’t need to wear the mask.  After all, the vaccine is about ensuring I don’t get the virus, not me protecting others from getting sick.  Like the flu shot, it’s about protecting me not others.  But lo and behold, medical scientists who know more about this stuff than the rest of us urge us to continue wearing the damn mask even after vaccinated.  It’s about ensuring that others don’t get sick and die from Covid-19.

Throughout this ordeal, I could not wait until we never have to wear masks again.  They itch and make my nose run.  I frequently lower it to drink water.  The mask fogs my glasses.  I CANNOT SEE.  I cannot breathe.  In the early months, my complexion was ruined from sweat around the chin and mouth.  I learned to change masks frequently, not unlike a diaper, because of sweat and stinky breath.  Along with lots of medical-grade breath mints, I keep disposable facial cleansing clothes at work to wipe my face before putting on my second mask for the day.  I guess I go through three to five masks daily during the work week.  This is so … stupid.  We’re in the most modern age of mankind … and still when it comes to a pandemic, we’re no better off than our grandparents in 1918 or our European ancestors who survived the much more gruesome Black Plague in the Middle Ages.

When we are for real told to ditch the masks, I wonder how hard it will be.  We still remember vividly our previous carefree lives: of hugs and kisses; concerts and travel; shaking hands when greeting or meeting someone new; touching one another lightly just for encouragement, just to let people know and feel our care for them.  Our emotional and spiritual connection with one another has been broken during the pandemic.

We are humans.  We are emotional beings.  We are not rational at our core.  Our heart is our core.  To feel is our essence.  Life used to be about experiencing and feeling everything.  Instead, we’ve been emotionally stunted—for kids struggling to learn online, intellectually stunted, too.  We like to think we are smarter than our emotional selves, but there is no telling what a year or two of mask wearing will do to us psychologically, especially the young ones.

Will we easily be able to put these days of masks and oddness behind us?  I work where no one has seen me maskless except online.  Guess I’m feeling shy.  I’ll have to start lining my lips again and wear lipstick and powder my face—routines I dropped a year ago when figuring out the mask interferes with pride in appearance.  The mask allowed a casualness that is appealing to some.  But when the masks finally come off for good—when we are assured by medical scientists it’s OK to go bare faced, as God intended—first let us take a deep cleansing breath.  And let us never take life on earth for granted again.