The notion didn’t strike me right away when we met for the first time at a Coffee Bean in Studio City back in 2008. The smoldering warmth in N____’s smile, to me, was a revelation of heart — her true self on display.
Even after we married a year and a half later, the uncanny resemblance to Allison Portchnik — the blue eyes and ultra kind a countenance — hadn’t crossed my mind. Not until N____ and I had watched Annie Hall together, did their overlapping traits — both physical and character — began to weigh on my consciousness.
Unlike Alvy Singer’s crass taxonomy of Allison Portchnik at their first encounter, my wife was not “New York, Jewish, left-wing liberal, intellectual, Central Park West, Brandeis University, the socialist summer camps and the, the father with the Ben Shahn drawings, right, and the really, you know, strike-oriented, red diaper….” About the only things they have in common are those of being Jewish and “red diaper babies” (my wife was a Pioneer, member of a youth communist organization, back in Ukraine in the 1980s).
At the risk of stoking feminist ire, I will acknowledge that meekness in a woman has long fallen out of favor. In my view, however, it’s a serene kindness that sets apart both Allison Portchnik and my wife. Their voices sooth the senses, never grinding out a pitch that might grate upon one’s ears.
In the scene following Alvy and Allison’s introduction, they are a married couple playing out what appears to be a scenario typical of their relationship; one that ultimately ends their marriage. Alvy paces the bedroom chewing over a Kennedy assassination conspiracy while Allison pleads for his attention.
Facing the camera, Alvy asks, “Why did I turn off Allison Portchnik? She was beautiful, she was willing. She was real intelligent.” And at that point I have to suppress the urge to clobber Alvy Singer; especially after he rationalizes letting go of Allison because he didn’t want to belong to a club that would have him as a member.
While we may never know more about Alvy and Allison’s relationship because whatever footage that was shot of them fell to the film editor’s blade (a far more ambitious project that Woody Allen had titled Anhedonia; the surviving scenes becoming the celebrated film we know today as Annie Hall), there are a couple of visual clues that suggest Allison Portchnik was a musician.
During Alvy’s Kennedy assassination rant the camera pans over the married couple’s room, which features a music stand holding sheet music and a flute. There is also a film still of Carol Kane, presumably as Allison, cradling a cello (credited to United Artists, the studio that had distributed Annie Hall).
My wife became a self-taught pianist after years of pleading with her mother, day-in and day-out, for a piano. N____ later advanced her performance skills by attending music school and taking composition lessons from an accomplished composer.
At age 13 she competed in a Ukrainian national music contest for young performers. N____ placed second in the composer category; so extraordinary an occasion marked by a few tense moments as both her music teacher and her composition teacher scuffled over the honor of accompanying their protegeé to the stage to receive her award.
The comparisons between my wife and Allison Portchnik take a metatheatrical course if you consider other roles Carol Kane has played at the beginning of her acting career and well along after. She portrayed Gitl in Hester Street, the story of Russian Jewish emigres settling into lower east side New York City. Both my wife and Gitl possess the quiet, inner resolve to overcome harrowing circumstances that we all sometimes encounter.
In the early 1980s Carol Kane was cast as Simka, the love interest of Andy Kaufman’s Latka Gravas in the television sitcom Taxi. While the show never specifies their country of origin, with Yiddish-laden names like Latka and Simka — it’s difficult not to see the characters as shadow work of assimilated Jews projecting ill ease with the immigrant generation they’ve descended from.
In the Taxi episode that features Latka and Simka’s wedding ceremony, she takes a principled stand in defense of her relationship with Latka (the orthodox sect they belong to enforces customs that make getting married a near impossibility).
Likewise, N___ and I faced an obstacle that would have complicated our plan to get married. Illustrating a passionate defiance like Simka, N___ pressed on and because of her conviction we remain gratefully married soul mates to this day.
I have to admit, though, I have far more to be grateful for. Aside from qualities like her wit, intelligence and creativity that make her such a pleasure and joy to live and suffer with, she has patiently fashioned a far greater “me” out of me. So rare and delightful a woman I have cast my lot with, I cannot elaborate any further about my immense fortune. To do so would hazard an arrogance worthy of kings or emperors.
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This post was previously published on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock