Annie Hall, 1

It could have been Chicago as easily as New York, except that my friend Hadley played me The Complete Billie Holiday On Verve not long before he showed me Amarcord. Amarcord felt foreign to me, captivating but too much like I'd jumped too deep the first time in. The prostitute on the beach when she exhales at the camera - that strange witchy hiss - the kids masturbating together in the car. You can imagine my shocked reaction.

Amarcord was on a copied cassette tape that Hadley got somewhere, and it was letterboxed. That process made sense immediately; I asked what else he had and he said Manhattan, but that I should see Annie Hall first. So I did. I went to the central library in downtown SA and checked it out. My discovery of Woody Allen, then, is first of all synonymous with nostalgia for everything I've watched since. But after Annie Hall, I didn't go back to Fellini, or branch out in another direction. I kept watching Woody Allen movies, out of order, but until I'd seen them all. It's possible to separate my appreciation for Annie Hall specifically from that context, but there is, of course, a context.

It could have been Chicago because Chicago, like New York, was metropolitan and cold, two things San Antonio was not. Both cities had places that were open all night and black and white photographs of famous people in smart clothes, in dark clubs with elegant drinks on the table and even an elegant wash from the smoke from the cigarettes in their fingers. My father lived in New York one summer and had a few photographs he'd taken of the city. Tall buildings, crowded ferries. It was photographs that sold me, his and pictures I'd seen in books. But it was the crowds and cold that seemed so different: long coats, scarfs. I thought of all those people in winter, huddled alone on streets full of snow, then going into nightclubs or theaters to hear music or see movies, getting a sense of the city life around them in the near warmth of conversation, noise, and music (it was music first, and movies later).

Because I heard Billie Holiday on my way to listening to jazz, and not someone like Dinah Washington, New York became my preeminent mythic American history. Even today, Chicago is a city, for me, in books more than film - Saul Bellow, Stuart Dybek. My idea of New York was unique enough on the surface to not dip much beneath it, and Woody Allen confirmed that particular romanticized complacency. His idealized upper class existence seemed as good a place to start as any. He was funny and filled the streets with beautiful, smart women. But Annie Hall transcends that. This isn't an apology.