Apropos of Nothing

by Woody Allen

So it’s a hot summer day and you kill the morning returning deposit bottles to the market to earn two cents per bottle so you can ante up at the Midwood or the Vogue or the Elm, our nearest local three movie houses.

Three thousand miles away in Europe, Jews are being shot and gassed for no good reason by ordinary Germans who do it with great relish and have no trouble f...

two men are locked in the moronic choreography of road rage and are screaming and starting to swing at each other.

Or, if it’s breakfast for a married couple, they actually care about each other after years of being together and she doesn’t dwell on his failures, and he doesn’t call her a douchebag.

And when the movie ends, the second feature is a detective thriller where some hard-boiled private eye solves all life’s problems with a sock in the jaw and goes off with a stacked tomato the likes of which did not exist in any of my classes or any of the weddings, funerals, or bar mitzvahs I attended.

And by the way, I never attended a funeral: I was always spared reality. The first and only dead body I ever saw was that of Thelonious Monk, when I stopped off en route for dinner at Elaine’s to view him out of res...

took Mia Farrow with me; it was very early in our dating, and she was polite but dismayed and should have known then she was beginning a relationship with the wrong ...

Like the girls in class who tell you how lousy they did on the test and the results come back and they’re straight As.

“I don’t want reality, I want magic.”

Cecilia in Purple Rose of Cairo.

with some careful planning and hard work, my father managed to double its losses in record time.

causing my father many times to angrily pack all his clothes in a valise before unpacking the valise and going back to bed.

remember thinking that all the other people in the world, including my mother and father and aunt and uncle, were aliens from another planet who would at some moment remove their masks, revealing the monster faces they really owned, and hack me to pieces. Why such a terrible fantasy, I don’t know.

of course, the lady who sold pickles, a fearful creature who just sat like the minotaur next to a big barrel of pickles. She was a lump dressed in many sweaters, the layered look in spades.

there were countless movie houses within walking distance, all showing double features. The poorer ones showed two films, five cartoons, a weekly serial like Batman, and a funny short if it was Robert Benchley and not Joe McDoakes. Unfortunately, sometimes a travelogue would pop on, where Mister Fitzgerald would take us to places like Ceylon and Java, the land that time forgot, whether we wanted to go or not. And sometimes you’d get a door prize, perhaps a paper gun that made a loud noise when you snapped it forward, but here’s the killer—for

for all that, the price of admission was twelve cents.

The price in the classy cinemas was twenty cents, then a quarter, then thirty-five cents. When it hit fifty-five cents, the neighborhood rose up like the crew of the Potemkin. Someone told me a ticket now can be twenty dollars. You know how many...

My dad never saw a gun he didn’t like. He could never resist a shooting gallery, which then had rifles and live ammunition.

In later life he got a pistol permit, rationalizing that he needed to pack heat because he carried around jewelry.

In those years he hustled jewelry and came home late because he also wa...

He didn’t need a gun and pulled the pistol only twice: once, he marched a troublemaker off a city bus; once, alone in the subway at three a.m. and confronted by four young men, he took it out and fired a shot into the black of the tunnel. They turned on their heels and ran. Not that they attacked him, but he sensed they were going to, although for...

There are no more blissful memories for me than playing hooky, getting on the train at Avenue J in Brooklyn, riding into the city, buying a

paper, ducking into the Automat, scarfing up some cherry pie and coffee, and reading Jimmy Cannon.

Pretending to be sick was hard.

I had no temperature I had to go to school, and since my mother always sat there after she stuck the thermometer in my mouth, it was almost impossible to find a radiator or light bulb to jack up the mercury without getting coldcocked.

My father coming home from work with ten new comic books, a buck’s worth.

family doctor to listen to Inner Sanctum or anything deemed too scary. Dr. Cohen advised my mother never to let me see any Frankenstein movies or Dracula because I was a tense kid

Avicenna

If you could fill a prescription or sell corn plasters, she’d let you perform brain surgery. If you were an actual doctor, you were God.

A doctor’s name was pronounced with the same reverence accorded a rabbi.

I hated, loathed, and despised school.

I’m talking about the early 1940s.

After the war, it got some teachers wh...

I was dragged up a flight of stairs by my ear by Miss Reid, the assistant principal, may she rot in the “serl.” That’s how she pronounced it while I cringed—“The worm is good for the serl.” It’s soil, fatso, I wanted to say and then shovel her under it.

The few male teachers were more relaxed liberal Jews. One of the best was fired because his ideas were too liberal. At something called Sing, where each class would choose a song, sing it, and stage it in the assembly hall, he chose a turn-of-the-century number called “Boops-a-Daisy,” which went, “hands” (dancers touch hands), “knees” (dancers slap their knees) and “Boops-a-Daisy” (couples turn away from each other and bump their

backsides together). Well, the biddies stood there aghast as if he had staged a ga...

To these frigid anti-Semites it reeked of lewdness.

“inappropriate”

Appropriate ...

coven of teachers,

designed to see that no one ever learned anything.

You lined up and couldn’t talk—what the ...

nothing that made the grim business of human existence bearable.

You learned by rote, except you never learned.

God is silent, I used to say, now if we can only get the teachers to shut up.

I still cringe thinking back on the school lines in the basement, indoors because it was raining or snowing; the stink of wet wool from our sweaters that got soaked, and getting caught doing something innocuous like whispering to a friend or stealing a kiss in the wardrobe closet and having your mother sent for.

Should I like clapping the erasers together to beat the chalk dust out of them? A privilege some of the more sluggish kids vied for.

You can imagine this idea was not appreciated by the teaching staff at P.S. 99, my mother, or even Barbara Westlake, who was six, not into dry martinis, and sobbed hysterically when Bambi’s mother got whacked.

useless thing like “the correct word for the numeral zero is aught.”

“There’s something wrong with him,” my mother says, instantly taking the side of anyone who hates me.