After seeing the terrific new Woody Allen movie, Vicky Christina Barcelona, I went to the bookstore and while looking at magazines suddenly heard someone call my name. I looked up to find a friend from work greeting me with a big smile. We hugged, and she introduced me to her husband, and as the three of us chatted and made jokes, I couldn’t help but feel like I was in a Woody movie — the one I’d just seen, and the great Manhattan ones of old, where friends and former lovers are forever running into each other in bookstores. Later, I stopped for gas, and pleased myself by initiating a minute and a half of most excellent banter with the cute guy in the adjacent lane, a young musician with a giant petal drum in the back seat of his Jeep (the perfect sight for a sunny California afternoon). We did not fall in love (he didn’t anyway), but driving away, I gave a mental salute to Woody Allen, whose film had sparked to life my dulled-out inner voice. The movies, I was reminded anew, speak to us, and sometimes — all too rarely — we want to continue the conversation out in the bright light of day. (Chuck Wilson)