The Purple Rose of Houston Street

I bumped into Woody Allen on Houston late one night, right outside the Angelika.

I think it was a coincidence. I don't think he'd gone to see his movie.

It was a long time ago, long before Woody Allen became problematic, or before the world at large thought of him as problematic. My girlfriend at the time and I had just gotten out of a revival screening of The Purple Rose of Cairo, the movie Woody Allen directed with Mia Farrow and Jeff Daniels in the leading roles. Mia Farrow, Woody Allen's erstwhile partner and later accuser, is a depressed waitress during the Depression. She has an abusive husband, so instead of going home, she escapes to the movies. The movie she sees in the theater – not the Angelika, but a theater in Brooklyn standing in for a theater in New Jersey, where Mia Farrow's character is supposed to live – is called, of course, The Purple Rose of Cairo. So it's a movie within a movie. Mia Farrow, watching the movie within the movie, escaping from her real life within the movie, falls in love with a corny archeologist played by Jeff Daniels, who falls in love with her too, from inside the movie within the movie, so he breaks free of his silver screen and joins her in the movie theater. Bittersweet hijinks ensue, both within the movie within the movie and within the movie, especially when the actor playing the archeologist, also played by Jeff Daniels, shows up to rein in his escaped character and get him back into the movie within the movie. There's a love triangle involving Mia Farrow and Jeff Daniels and Jeff Daniels, and it all ends as it must.

It's a romantic movie, but also funny, and also sad.

I'm not the kind of guy who notices celebrities on the streets of New York, or anywhere, probably because I'm in my own head, which Woody Allen was, too. He hardly looked at us, even as our arms brushed against each other on the narrow sidewalk. My girlfriend elbowed me in the ribs and said, "Hey, that's Woody Allen!", and by the time I'd said "Who?" and turned around, Woody Allen had already shuffled away.

"It's a sign," my girlfriend said. Just like I never notice celebrities, I never notice signs, either. Which is probably why my girlfriend and I didn't last.

"What is?" I asked.

"That we saw Woody Allen right after seeing The Purple Rose of Cairo. What are the chances of that?"

Slim, that's true. Even if it's New York. The chances would have been slimmer in Podunk, or even New Jersey.

"Slim," I said, and continued walking along Houston, towards the bar on Ludlow where we used to go after movies at the Angelika.

My girlfriend stayed put. I should mention that my girlfriend's name was Cecilia, the same name as Mia Farrow's character in The Purple Rose of Cairo. That's also a sign, I guess, which is probably why I haven't mentioned it until now.

My name isn't Gil or Tom, the names of the characters Jeff Daniels plays in The Purple Rose of Cairo and The Purple Rose of Cairo. It's not Jeff, either, or Woody, which would be weird.

"I think we should spend the night," Cecilia said.

Since we lived together at the time, that seemed like a reasonable suggestion.

"Okay," I said. "But shall we get a drink first?"

"I mean, spend the night at the movie theater. At the Angelika."

It took me a moment to realize she wasn't talking about a midnight showing, some pre-premiere or The Rocky Horror Picture Show all night on infinite loop. She wanted to spend the night at the closed Angelika, the locked Angelika, just her and me, illegally. I opened my mouth to object, but Cecilia didn't take kindly to objection.

"Okay," I said. "But shall we get a drink first?"

"We have to sneak back in now and hide, before it's too late. The restroom until everybody's gone, and then we can sneak into our auditorium. It has to be that one, or it won't work."

What won't work? I thought. But "okay," I said.

I'll fast-forward through the next bit, because it's what you'd expect: Cecilia and I hid in a stall in the women's room, the lights finally went off, we heard human chatter and doors lock, and when the only sound left was the subway beneath us, we snuck into the auditorium where we'd seen The Purple Rose of Cairo a couple hours before, we had sex on the sticky floors, which isn't as gross as it sounds, if you're careful, and figured out how to recline for the night on the movie theater seats, limbs crooked and entwined.

It was romantic, but also funny, and also weird and uncomfortable.

I dozed off for a bit, in and out of sleep, but the pain in my neck and the pressure in my bladder were getting to me. Cecilia was sleeping the sleep of the dead. Discomfort and weirdness didn't affect her much. I started to wonder how this would end, when the first screening of the new day would be, when a projectionist or janitor or security guard would find us and berate us or arrest us.

I was wide awake.

I extracted myself from Cecilia, surprised that I didn't wake her up, although that probably says more about her than it says about me. I readjusted her head on an armrest and headed back up towards the restroom.

I should mention this was in the era before cell phones, or at least before cell phones that had built-in flashlights, and we hadn't left our apartment that evening with the intention to spend the night at the Angelika, so we didn't have tube flashlights or penlights or lighters or candles with us, either. The only lights guiding me to the restroom were the illuminated exit signs and emergency lighting, mostly red, some green, a few other blinking white and blue lights of uncertain provenance, and, filtering down the stairs from ground level, pale streetlights shining through darkened windows. This had been fun on our way from the restroom to the auditorium because we held hands and kept stumbling into each other, like a drunk Woody Allen on a late-night Manhattan street, and during sex, because we both could imagine we were having sex with someone else, a celebrity crush from the movies, perhaps, Dianne Wiest in my case, who was also in The Purple Rose of Cairo, who knows in Cecilia's case. Not me, I'm sure. But now that I was alone, with no one's hand to hold, the stickiness and afterglow of sex having faded, it was just annoying and creepy and dangerous. I bumped my funny bone, twice, and I probably skinned my knee under my jeans when I fell on the stairs, also twice. I could barely make out the difference between the men's and women's restrooms so I just entered whichever was closest, which turned out to be the wrong one, but nobody cared because the Angelika was empty, except for Cecilia, who was asleep in our auditorium below.

As I worked my way through the facilities, the toilet, the paper, the sink, the faucet and the soap, my eyes adjusted better to the light, but after I'd punched the paper towel dispenser multiple times, trying to turn on a hand dryer that didn't exist, I wiped my hands off on my jeans and headed out into the hallway in front of the restroom, where a flickering shadow of Dianne Wiest disappeared down the stairs in front of me.

It was just my imagination, of course, the flashes of light you see when you close your eyes or are in the dark, your brain playing tricks on you because there's no incoming data to process. But I still followed her down the stairs.

Now that I live in Manhattan, I don't have a car anymore, but I did in my rural hometown growing up, where there weren't a lot of things to do evenings and weekends except drive ten miles to the mall, hang out there and hope something would happen, and then drive home. You're probably not like me, if you have a car: You probably park your car at the mall, and even after spending the whole day there, you still remember where you parked. I never could remember. I'd wander the parking lot aimlessly, sometimes for hours, usually until a security guard approached me and asked me why I was loitering. Sometimes, the security guard was helpful and would help me locate my car, through a complicated series of questions and answers involving landmarks I might have seen that day, like Sears or TGI Fridays, but sometimes things would get nasty and I'd have to punch the security guard and run away and find my car on my own before they found me.

During those days and nights wandering the parking lot, looking for my car, I'd imagine what kind of woman I'd be with someday, and what I imagined was never Cecilia. The woman I'd be with would be somewhere on the spectrum from Jennifer Connelly to Brooke Shields to Lara Flynn Boyle. So when I met Cecilia on a blind date at the bar on Ludlow, and she called me a few days later and asked me out again, I was disappointed, and I probably took it out on her over the years, but I figured that's just the way life works, like not being able to find your car in the mall parking lot.

All of this meant two things that night: First, I followed the shade of Dianne Wiest down the stairs of the Angelika, through the hallways and doors that led to back corridors only the cinema staff have access to, corridors lined with pipes and cables and black mold, no doubt, like abandoned tunnels of the subway I could hear rumbling below. Second, even if I hadn't been following Dianne Wiest, I wouldn't have been able to find the auditorium where we'd seen The Purple Rose of Cairo, where Cecilia was sleeping, blissful and alone, on a cramped upholstered seat, because she'd bought the tickets and I hadn't paid attention when we entered the auditorium and she'd held me by the hand when we snuck in after dark.

I lost sight of Dianne Wiest, but out of the corner of my eye, I saw other flickers of light, other flickers of actors from half-remembered movies, Kevin Kline and Rutger Hauer and even Rick Moranis, I think, the princess who starred with him in Spaceballs, along with Bill Pullman, whom I always confused with Jeff Daniels before I knew better, no Jennifer Connelly, no Brooke Shields, no Lara Flynn Boyle, but maybe Sherilyn Fenn and Daryl Hannah, who always intimidated me. Spaceballs was the first movie Cecilia and I saw together, probably not the best choice for a date, even though it was a revival screening. We argued all night after Spaceballs, on the sidewalk outside the Angelika, until passers-by called the police.

I ended up in one of the projection booths, surrounded by equipment, the 35mm projector head, a Simplex, from what I could make out in the light from the exit sign, the xenon lamphouse, the three-deck film platter and multiple reels of film, probably The Purple Rose of Cairo. I touched the cool metal of the reels and wondered what life was like for Mia Farrow, for Jeff Daniels, for the other Jeff Daniels inside the movie, now that the projectors were off, now that they were in a can, where all is black and they disappear, where they are nothing until the projector fires up again and displays them on the silver screen. I touched all the other controls and buttons and levers, I didn't know what they did because I never got to work in the cinema at our local mall, given my reputation. I would have been a good film projectionist, I think, but it was one of those things in life that didn't turn out as planned, like Cecilia.

I looked out the projection port, the window into the auditorium below, but I couldn't make out anything, no seats, no screen, no Cecilia. She was probably down there, unaware that I was even gone.

I felt my way around the equipment and guessed what the controls were for, which automation buttons I had to push, and after fiddling with several things in the dark that did nothing, the projector whirred to life, the xenon bulb fired up and lit up the silver screen in the auditorium below, dazzling light surrounded by darkness, a blank screen on which any vision of life could be projected, if only you had the right reel, light that would brutally awaken anyone who happened to be sleeping in the auditorium seats. I liked surprising Cecilia that way, waking her up from a dead sleep, giving her something she liked, something she'd appreciate, like breakfast in bed or a quickie.

I could hardly make out her figure in the auditorium, but she looked like she was standing, like she was talking to flickers, several of them, but my eyes hadn't adjusted to the sudden brightness yet, and I was still standing in the darkness of the projection booth. I squinted my eyes and tried to make out more details, but all I could see was light and dark, the silver screen and the void, and the longer I stared through the window, the less I could see, the less I understood, the strain was too much, it'd been a long night, and I lost consciousness, I fainted, or maybe I just fell asleep.

At the end of The Purple Rose of Cairo, the archeologist returns to his movie within the movie, without Mia Farrow, and all the copies of the movie are incinerated, so that the archeologist will never be able to escape again. All of the characters in The Purple Rose of Cairo – the movie within the movie, not the movie – are annihilated. There will be no more movie within a movie, no more archeologist for Mia Farrow to fall in love with. Except, of course, in The Purple Rose of Cairo, the movie, which hasn't been incinerated, and where the story of Mia Farrow and the archeologist lives on.

When I came to, I was surrounded by darkness, looking into darkness. Hours passed, and more hours, without a sound, without a sensation, just nothing, and even the passage of the hours felt like nothing to me, until I felt myself lifted up and spun around, surrounded by brightness, as the xenon light shone through the celluloid, through the projector, and projected me onto the silver screen. I saw the audience in the auditorium, looking expectantly at me. I heard my voice speak a line from the movie, from The Purple Rose of Cairo, but the line of a minor character, a minor character no one remembers, someone who hardly made the credits, barely more than an extra. Out of the corners of my eyes, I could see flickering shadows acting out their roles around me, the audience laughed, the audience gasped and cried, couples held hands, a woman sat there alone, dabbing her eyes with a tissue. To me, the movie around me was all a blur, sound and fury signifying nothing. At most, I was a speck on the screen, a two-dimensional projection of emptiness, with no significant role to play, no one to entertain, no one to get angry at.

One night, the auditorium was almost empty, the show had already started, my line had just been spoken, and I saw a couple walk into the auditorium, they took their seats, the seats where Cecilia and I had started to spend the night together, Cecilia and someone new, someone real, and they looked up at me, and they looked happy.