Word: midwood
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Whatever its failings as explanation, the film is interesting as description. Interspersed among the shots of Allen talking to the camera, or scribbling over and over on a first draft of some comedy routine, we see scenes of Midwood High School, which he attended for three uneventful years, and the playground at Avenue L and East 17th Street where he spent much time as a growing boy. Trying to give us a feel for his background, the camera sweeps past the Orthodox Jews buying fruit at the numerous stands on Avenue J, past the movie house and the pizzerias...
Much of the northern half of Brooklyn is turning into Bushwicks. The white neighborhoods in the south half--Midwood, Flatlands, Brighton Beach, Mill Basin, Canarsie, Bay Ridge--look north and fear, because the poverty seems to be creeping ever closer. And for many of these people there's nowhere left to run. They're willing to make their stand, as they put it, because somebody has to. The older people especially, with fixed incomes and meager lives, lock themselves in at night to avoid becoming victims and tremble at approaching footsteps in the day--they have no place...
...tell you what we talk about when we get together," says Andrea Heizberg, 16, a senior at Midwood High School in a middle-class section of Brooklyn. "We talk about college, because that is where we are going. We talk about money, because you can't do anything unless you have it, and we talk about the opposite sex-always. Sometimes we talk about books...
This ability to merchandise his misery provided Allen's escape from the ghetto. His IQ may have been astronomical, but the figures on his exams at Midwood High School bottomed out below C level. "It was a school for emotionally disturbed teachers," he says. "I failed to make the chess team because of my height." Lines like that fractured Allen Konigsberg's fellow juniors. For laughs-and a few bread crumbs-the class clown sent them on to columnists under an assumed name...
Segal was born in Brooklyn in 1937 and came to Harvard in 1954 out of Midwood High School. He majored in Classics, a discipline representing individual preference as well as the influence of his rabbi father. He also ran for the track team, wisely but not too well, though he fondly recalls his tutelage under Bill McCurdy. "McCurdy is one of the glories of Harvard. He is one of the finest teachers you have...