Apropos of Nothing

by Woody Allen

Yes, there was something wrong with me. I liked girls. I liked everything about girls. I enjoyed their company, I liked the sound of their laughter, I liked their anatomy and I wanted to be at the Stork Club with them and not in the shop class with the local male troglodytes making a lopsided tie rack.

Now unbeknownst to them, this punishment to me, if I may use a Yiddish word, was a mitzvah.

First of all, I never bought into the whole religious thing. I thought it was all a big hustle.

Didn’t ever think there was a God; didn’t think he’d conveniently favor the...

Loved...

Hated b...

The Hebrew language was too guttural ...

The Nazis are putting us in ovens. First attend to that.

And why did the women have to sit upstairs in the synagogue?

Those hirsute zealots who wrapped themselves in prayer shawls on the premier level, nodding up and down like bobbleheads and kissing a string up to some imaginary power who, if he did exist, despite all their begging ...

Not worth my time, and my time was the g...

My mother hit me every day at least once.

though my father only did once, when I told him to fuck off and he made his displeasure known with a gentle tap across my face that gave me an unimpeded view of the Aurora Borealis.

what a treat it was when at eight, my father first took me to Lundy’s, the legendary seafood restaurant in Brooklyn where I could pig out on clams, oysters, and shellfish, confident God was nowhere near Sheepshead Bay that day.

Anyhow, the bar mitzvah comes. Today, they have theme bar mitzvahs: Star Wars, King Arthur, the Wild West.

Gorky’s Lower Depths.

Uncles and other men on their feet, smoking two packs a day despite a medley of massive heart attacks and strokes, wink and smugly shake my hand with a ten spot in theirs.

wherein a young Jew is supposed to become a man, although I remained a mouse.

I typed my first one-liners on a stolen typewriter and made my first malted on a purloined Hamilton Beach machine.

This was unheard of for a kid of that age, but I had plenty of freedom,

Andrew also had a little letch for show business and was a good-looking kid whose parents had some dough and spoiled him much worse than I was spoiled, so much so that he ended up jumping out a window in his twenties when real life made its grinning appearance.

Poor Andrew. Narcotics to escape, then the open window in the hospital.

PAL baseball team.

do not expect you to take my word for this, but if any of you readers ever run into guys from the old neighborhood, ask them.

did some routines at a local Jewish club to great success, and by junior year I was a wannabe comic, wannabe magician, wannabe baseball player, but in the end just a lousy student.

Besides the fact that Lincoln had freed the slaves, my knowledge of politics was slim.

Stendhal and Dostoevsky would now replace Felix the Cat and Little Lulu.

So I read. Some of it I liked, some of it I did not.

Reading was always competing with sports, movies, j...

but I loved Hemingway and Camus because they were simple and caused me to feel, but I couldn’t get through Henry James, hard as I tried.

wrote the Broadway comic’s version of that scene in Play It Again, Sam and played it with Diane Keaton.

polymorphous perversity

I never read Ulysses, Don Quixote, Lolita, Catch-22, 1984, no Virginia Woolf, no E. M. Forster, no D. H. Lawrence.

never saw Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms or The Circus or The Navigator by Buster Keaton. Never saw any version of A Star Is Born.

Theater, I never saw How Green Was My Valley or Wuthering Heights or Camille or Now, Voyager or Ben-Hur or many others.

They Drive by Night, The Uninvited, The Bride of Frankenste...

this day I’ve never seen Mr. Deeds Goes to Town or Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Example: I prefer Chaplin to Keaton.

Like Some Like It Hot or Bringing Up Baby—to me, neither was funny. Nor do I like It’s a Wonderful Life.

Frankly, would love to strangle the cutesy guardian

a...

Trouble in Paradise, however, I find a knockout, a Faberge egg.

Love musicals: Singing in the Rain, Gigi, Meet Me in St. Louis, The Band Wagon, My Fair Lady.

Never liked An American...

Of course, the Marx Brothers and W. C. Fields are the ...

But who cares what I think—it’s taste.

You may find those willowy lingerie models beautiful and sexy and I may not.

And aren’t I most happy in a room by myself?

You’ll hate me, but I don’t like pets. Naturally, I don’t like being bitten and I hate being shed on, licked, or barked at.

In the spring, my friends and I went barefoot. Even to school.