In late January of this year, Alice B. Toklas appeared in New York City for two days.

She walked in Central Park. She visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to check up on Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein, her partner in life. She ate a hot dog — like a pro, stacked with relish — at a truck parked at the foot of the museum’s steps. To passers-by, in her bear-size brown overcoat, white ruff blouse, and a hat festooned with flowers, she was just another New Yorker. No explanations offered. No questions asked. Tourists to the city, eager for New York oddity, got their money’s worth those two days.

Toklas, who died in 1967, was being impersonated — some would say incarnated — by Maira Kalman, the painter, illustrator and author, whose newest book is a colorful reissue of “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,” by Gertrude Stein, originally published in 1933. Ms. Kalman’s uncanny turn as Alice was the basis of a short movie that she was making with Alex Kalman, her son and a filmmaker, as part of her intention to inhabit her subject, in order to depict her life. Nico Muhly, the composer, plays the Satie piano piece that closes the film, with Ms. Kalman as Alice heel-clicking down Fifth Avenue.

“Only in New York,” Ms. Kalman said recently, over French-pressed coffee in her West Village apartment. “The amount of people who didn’t notice. OK, there’s this woman with a lot of makeup and this gigantic nose” — the makeup artist gave her two, over her own. “OK, there’s another person in New York. Nobody’s normal. And that’s why we live here, right?”