Quote of the Day (Mary Rodgers, on Woody Allen and His First Wife)

“At 22, Woody [Allen] looked about 12 but was already the inventive weirdo he would become famous as a decade later. His wife, Harlene, who made extra money typing scripts for the office, was even nerdier, but only inadvertently funny. She looked, and sounded, a bit like Olive Oyl, with reddish hair, freckles, and a bad case of adenoids. Woody, whenever he wasn’t working on his sketches — his best that summer was about a man-eating cake — was either sitting on a wooden chair on the porch outside the barracks, practicing his clarinet, or inside with her, practicing sex, possibly from a manual. He was doing better, it seemed, with the clarinet.”—Once Upon a Mattress composer Mary Rodgers (1931-2014), on Woody Allen and his first wife, in Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers, written by Mary Rodgers and Jesse Green (2022)