Gotham Diary:
Caught in the Act
16 February 2012
Last Friday, we saw Woody Allen again, Ms NOLA and I. We had just turned the corner from 82nd Street onto Madison Avenue, and were heading south, to Crawford Doyle. With the gentlest insistence, Ms NOLA urged me to look up. (She knows that, because of ankylosing spondylitis, my eyes are usually directed at the pavement when I’m walking.) I did as bid, and there they were, Mr & Mrs, walking in our direction. As soon as I had taken them in, I dropped my gaze. It felt like an invasion of privacy to have paid any attention at all. But this time, at least, I did see him.
***
We had been coming from the Museum the first time, too. I think that we had just seen the Diane Arbus exhibit. It was snowing, heavily and quietly. I wanted a cup of tea, or perhaps I’d just bought some books at the gift shop, but in any case we kept straight on 82nd Street. It was on the Park Avenue median that Ms NOLA asked me if I’d seen him. Whom? Woody Allen. No, I hadn’t. I’d been too busy airing my latest theories about the bourgeoisie.
I remember what I was talking about because I hoped, when Ms NOLA told me whom we’d just passed, that Woody Allen hadn’t been too lost in thought to hear me carrying on as if I were re-enacting a familiar scene from one of his movies. In the middle of the day, an older man, who probably ought to be at work, discourses sagely to a pretty young woman, in whom he takes an avuncular but not ungallant interest. We might have been John Houseman and Martha Plimpton, in Another Woman. What enameled the incident with perfection was my having been too busy dispensing my wisdom to notice the passing writer and director.
Never had I felt so compleatly the New Yorker. If Woody Allen didn’t catch me in the act, it wasn’t my fault.