In Search of a Line from Annie Hall
by Corey Mesler

We were mooncalves when it came to Woody Allen. We saw every movie more times than we called our mothers. We could retell every joke from Bananas or Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex. We cried all five times we saw Interiors—and that was just during its first run, before the video revolution. We said, “Don’t worry about me, sister. I’m like a cat. I always land on my feet.” We said, “Well, not the actual Ching itself.”

And then there was Annie Hall. It was a high water-mark film. It divided our lives with a before and after like the preceding generation was divided by Kennedy’s assassination. There was Woody Allen before Annie Hall—the Court Jester—and there was Woody Allen after Annie Hall—our very own Bergman/Lubitsch. I remember the hush in the theater when the lights went down the first time I saw Annie Hall: a hush of expectation, a group-knowledge that we were about to be transformed, that we were in the company of greatness. How did we know? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that silence, that reverential silence of hope and anticipation, the same which existed in dens and bedrooms across America right before Dylan released Blood on the Tracks.

Of course we memorized it, line for line, shrug for shrug, every camera angle, every long shot, every Manhattan setting. We fell in love with Diane Keaton. We all did. I wrote a poem about her. It was published and I sent her the magazine. She wrote back. I was sanctified. I had a letter from Annie Hall. The movie became a touchstone, a sacred relic we passed around like a, well, a sacred relic. We knew we were taking part in a National ritual, like singing the anthem or hating Nixon. When my friend Eddie and I went home separately to write out our top 50 movie lists we both had the same movie at the top. Annie Hall.  It remains there today.

Later, when the screenplay was published we bought it. We didn’t need it, though. We had the movie whole in our rattletrap heads.

And yet, there was a pea underneath the one hundred mattresses of our devotion to Annie Hall. It was one line, a line that made no sense, a stillborn joke. For a while no one spoke about it. It was silently agreed that we would ignore what we didn’t understand. It’s like this in many religions I believe, the ease with which one skates over thorny issues, eyes on the larger prize. The larger prize in this case was our proprietary feelings for a movie, a movie that mixed humor and pathos and beautiful writing and lovely acting into a decisive Artist’s Statement.

Ok, here is the pea. The line that made no sense. In a conversation Alvy Singer has with one of his wives he is bemoaning the menacing dangers of country living, and in his list of negative qualities he says: “You’ve got Dick and Terry.” That’s it. Who the hell were Dick and Terry? We figured it was just one of his insider jokes, one you only got if you were either an intimate of Mr. Allen’s or you lived in his particular Manhattan at exactly his particular point in time. Or perhaps it was a wink, wink intellectual joke, like maybe we just weren’t smart enough to get it. Like the joke from Crimes and Misdemeanors, “I love him like a brother. David Greenglass.” Unless you knew your American history and knew that David Greenglass was Ethel Rosenberg’s rat brother, the joke sailed over your head like a Hank Aaron swat. We went back to the screenplay, printed in Four Films by Woody Allen. The line as transcribed there: “Dick and Terry.”

So. Dick and Terry. Years went by. Decades. We grew old. We lived through the highs (Hannah and her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Broadway Danny Rose) and the lows (Radio Days, Small Time Crooks). We watched our silver screen champion play out a personal drama in the gossip rags that sunk some of us but not all. We were, after all, a generation that accepted the bitter truth that some of our best artists were assholes, like Jackson Pollock, or Norman Mailer. And, all the time, there was that dead joke, that inane line.

Sometime during my middlescence I began to feel the need to sew up all loose ends. Maybe not all, some, some of the loose ends. Life began to seem like the cable knit sweater that Pee Wee Herman spoke of. Concurrently, something else arose that changed the way we thought about information or the lack thereof: The Internet. The Internet, which is like the proverbial sage on the mountaintop. If you knew how to Google, if you were good at it, you could find out anything. Any Thing. It is the Rosetta Stone of the Information Age, translating the hieroglyphics of our ignorance into smug erudition.

The quest was on. We would do it. My wife, an Allenmaniac like myself, and I went in search of the Final Mystery of Annie Hall. We began, simply enough, by asking everyone we knew. We asked our most cinematically mad cohorts. No one knew. Some didn’t even care. Age does this to people, I’ve noticed. It lowers their curiosity temperature.

So to The Internet we repaired.

Out there, on the WorldWideWeb, there are Woody Allen sites. Dozens of them. Maybe hundreds. As you would expect there are. If there’s a www.alyssamilano.com there will be many acolytes of the Woodman. It would seem then a simple thing to ask of these disciples our one question. The Internet tended to make quests too simple. The line from “Sunshine Superman” which stumped you your whole life turns up on the very first Donovan site you query. It is “And dive for your pearls in the sea.” Not “And therefore you’re puffing to see” as you thought. So, ok, you put the question to a few Woody Allen authorities.

\You can see where this is going. The answer was not forthcoming. Many sites’ email addresses bounced. This was a typical Internet bugaboo. The sites that answered agreed that it was a head-scratcher. Some said, hey, if you find out let me know. There we sat. The experts didn’t even know. Was there a way to email Mr. Allen perhaps? Or maybe Moses Productions? What about Tony Roberts—he wasn’t doing anything else. We were at an impasse.

Friends, sometimes the answer you are looking for is right in your backyard. Or, more accurately, it’s at the desk right next to yours. Many a lover has found a mate this way. After Internet dating, after the Personals, boing!, that person who has been sitting near you for the past ten years is revealed to be the  man/woman of your dreams. It’s like a fairy tale.

See, recently, at the bookstore my wife and I own, we were talking about this quest, about this aborted quest really, regretting that it was a sticky wicket we would never get past. Surely, we had had this conversation many times among our co-workers, who are all movie fans. We were done fishing. We had called back all boats. We were admitting that the white whale had defeated us. And, suddenly, like God parting the clouds to have a chin-chin with Moses, Robb DeNyse, who is the manager of the bookstore, said, casually, artlessly, innocently, off the cuff, “Maybe they’re the killers from In Cold Blood.”

Yeah, right, we said. Like we would have missed that. Of course, it was easy enough to check; we were in a bookstore.

I took a copy of In Cold Blood from its accustomed spot under Southern Writers and opened it to a page in the middle. It was right there. The infamous duo’s names. Dick and Perry. See, it’s Perry, not Terry. Land o’goshen. A mistake had been made, a small gaffe, and, really, not one which makes that much difference. We wouldn’t have gotten it if we had been looking for a P instead of a T.

Whose blunder is it? you ask.  If you go back and listen closely to your DVD of Annie Hall, it’s pretty clear Mr. Allen says, “Dick and Terry.” So, simply put, he misspoke. He blew his own joke. Huh, we said. This is ok, we said. We think this is ok. His fallibility is well-established. Our gods remain lower case.

So, credit where credit is due. Mr. Robb DeNyse deciphered the code, ending the decades-long pursuit of the esoteric joke in Annie Hall, the one that, it turns out, misfires. At the end of all our questing we are come up hard against the fact that Woody Allen made a mistake, a mistake that it took us years to ferret out. Now our hungry minds can move on to other puzzles. We have finished with Annie Hall.

Does anyone know who Semolina Pilchard is?

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Corey Mesler is the owner of Burke’s Book Store, in Memphis, Tennessee, one of the country’s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores. He has published poetry and fiction in numerous journals including Rattle, Pindeldyboz, Quick Fiction, Cranky, Thema, Mars Hill Review, Poet Lore and others.  He has also been a book reviewer for The Memphis Commercial Appeal.  A short story of his was chosen for the 2002 edition of New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, published by Algonquin Books.   Talk, his first novel, appeared in 2002. Nice blurbs from Lee Smith, John Grisham, Robert Olen Butler, Frederick Barthelme, and others. He has a new novel, We Are Billion-Year-Old Carbon, just out from Livingston. He has 5 chapbooks due out in 2006.  He also claims to have written, “Ride, Captain, Ride.” Most importantly, he is Toby and Chloe’s dad and Cheryl’s husband.