After 48 years, I got to see “Annie Hall” again on a big screen in a movie theatre.

Last Sunday, a week after Diane Keaton died, the Cinema Arts Center,  a storied theatre just a stone’s throw from my home on Long Island, had a special screening of this beloved film. I snapped up tickets as soon as I saw the notification, knowing the limited seating would be sold out quickly. Though I knew I could view the film on streaming services, this favorite movie needed to be seen on a large screen.

And I knew what I would wear.

You can’t think of Diane Keaton without conjuring up the image of her as Annie Hall. It not only is the role that won her a best actress Oscar but the one that launched her as a style icon, introducing the world to her idiosyncratic look.

One I embraced full throttle as a young woman.

There are no photos of me from 1977 as a 22-year-old art student at the School of Visual Arts when “Annie Hall” was a big style influence for me.  It was a time of competing fashion trends, none of which really intrigued me.  Wrapping myself in glittering polyester to dance the night away at a disco appealed to me as much as wearing the ripped fishnet stockings and safety pins of punk.

Though I would wear a Diane Von Furstenburg wrap dress for a dinner date at Sign of the Dove, it was another Diane that spoke to my creative, quirky soul.

I sensed a kindred spirit.

So for much of the time, I happily ditched my Huckapoo shirt for a Brooks Brothers button-down one, along with an oversized patterned tie tucked into an oversized vest, baggy khaki trousers, topped off with a bowler.

Less a fad than an acknowledgement to dress in a way that felt so comfortable to me.

A self that had no interest in mimicking a jiggling Suzane Summers or Farrah Fawcett.  A direct linkage, perhaps to the little girl I was, whose alter ego was a French artist named Pierre who dressed in bow ties and a blazer.

It became my day-to-day look in art school, but without the benefit of an iphone or the lure of Instagram no one at the time thought to document me.

But now here I am at seventy, La- Di- Da, dressed in a homage to Diane Keaton and an homage to the me that first fell in love and identified with everything about her 48 years ago.

Dressing the part to go to the movie was a snap, taking only minutes to assemble. I just reached into my closet. There was no rummaging through old boxes or dresser drawers hunting for the right pieces – the clothes were on hangers right in front of me in my closet, as though beckoning me back to a way of dressing that was once so familiar.

I was channeling Annie Hall and channeling an old part of myself.

The audience in the Cinema Arts theater was packed, filled with women and men of a certain age who loved “Annie Hall” too.

When I walked into the theatre lobby, people’s heads turned.

Despite being dressed as I was, I hadn’t even considered the reaction of the people in the theatre, but they began flocking to me, smiling warmly, wanting photos of me. Engaging with the audience was a gratifying bonus I hadn’t counted on.

The woman at the ticket booth said she did a double-take. Some said the resemblance was uncanny, others remarked I was her doppelganger

Some congratulated me on perfect cosplaying, but it ran so much deeper than that.

The thing of it was,  I wasn’t trying to be Diane Keaton, I just tapped into myself.

Full Circle

I sank into the soft, cushioned seats, as I had hundreds of times before, staring ahead at the screen.

I had only recently sat in the same darkened theatre with butterflies in my stomach, waiting for my short, deeply personal film “Perpetual” to be screened. Now the same screen that had been filled with larger-than-life images of me would be filled with Annie Hall.

My journey as an artist felt complete.

Sitting in a theatre, dressed as Annie Hall, dressed as me as a twenty-something just coming into my own as an artist, looking up at Diane Keaton in her iconic look was powerful in its house of mirrors.

The experience did not disappoint. It was larger than life.

Just Like Diane Keaton

When Moe Met Annie

Photos By John Martin

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2025. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream