Marianne in Manhattan

If you, like I, first fell in love with New York thanks to a Woody Allen film or two then you can’t help but have a soft spot for this consummate New Yorker, despite his unsavoury predilection for jailbait. Sometimes I like to fantasise about stumbling across one of his film shoots on a walk around my neighbourhood and having my image captured for posterity in the background of a quintessential Manhattan scene. Unfortunately Woody’s making movies in Europe these days, and even if I were inadvertently to become an extra, chances are I’d be memorialised tripping or spilling something or muttering to myself. It won’t come as a surprise that I’m not above the cheap thrill of getting close to a celebrity, but finding yourself spitting distance from Zach Braff, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Wallace Shawn just doesn’t compare to spotting Woody in the very city he salutes in so many of his films.

It’s fortunate then that Woody spends his Monday nights playing New Orleans jazz with his band at The Cafe Carlyle, a plush little supper club in a hotel on the Upper East Side. Woody has been playing jazz on Monday nights since forever, apparently he even played the night that Annie Hall won four Oscars in 1978. The Carlyle Hotel is itself a New York classic. It has a rich history as a hangout for the powerful and famous, from socialites to presidents - and there are candid pictures of John and Jacqueline Kennedy hanging in the lobby to prove it.

So a couple of Mondays ago, Dusty and I shared a classic New York experience. We had already polished off a couple of dirty martinis, a bottle of wine, and were mid-way through dinner when Woody entered from the back of the room, sat at a table right beside us, and set about inserting a reed into his clarinet. He was all hunched over and, thankfully, quite oblivious to my stares. Even though I could have, I chose not to reach out and touch him. When he got to playing, Woody on the clarinet was as neurotic, fidgety and awkward as Woody on film. It was a little odd that he never looked up at the audience with his eyes open, not even once, during the entire set of toe-tapping numbers, but you’ve got to give it up for a septaugenarian who’s religiously stuck to his weekly gig for decades. And as the clip below will demonstrate, he’s collected more than enough devoted fans to fill that room with warm applause every Monday night.