The Sounds of Music

Recently I was doing a little channel surfing and came across one of the best musicals ever, The Sound of Music, starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer. As a kid I was absolutely fascinated with this musical. In fact, I will say it, I wanted to be Maria Von Trapp. Not in the sense that she was a postulate nun, but I wanted to sing like her and galavant about a spacious estate in Austria caring for 7 children and teaching them to sing like nightingales much to their father's chagrin. Then I realized, I was 9 and all likelihood that would not happen ever to a girl from a very small village in Wisconsin. So, instead, I took up the reins of "Director" and made my ever-present cousin, Tanya, my Big Sister, Amy and Baby Sister become the stars of our own production of The Sound of Music. Amy (of course) was always Liesl (the suffering 16-going-on-17 year-old), Baby Sister was Gretel (she was only 3 and didn't have any lines much) and Tanya was Brigitta (not that she was very thrilled with being a secondary character) but she would also pick up lines for Louisa, Friedrich, Kurt and Marta if needs be. She was a very talented actress. I, of course, would be Maria. I knew all her lines and the words to the songs by heart. (So I was being Kevin Kostner directing AND starring in the main role...sue me.) We would put the record on the hi-fi and start singing along with it, the song bursting out of us like an overfilled balloon. We were positively magnificent. When we would go to my Aunt and Uncle's farm, they had the perfect place to perform. They had the neatest addition to their house that had a red carpeted stairway that we would practice "So Long, Farewell" on. Here, I would step in to play multiple roles so the song would play out correctly, like you do. We decided that after much practice and perfecting our roles, we would perform for Aunt and Uncle, Mom and Dad and Gramma and Grampa S. We were quite certain that some movie mogul would be innocently driving by and hear us singing and burst into the house to offer us an exclusive movie deal. (Because, there are so many rogue movie moguls roving about rural West Central Wisconsin...) So, the hour of our performance had come...and...Baby Sister backs out. She didn't like people watching her. Ok. Fine. We can work around the Gretel parts. Then, Big Sister backs out, mainly because at 11 years of age, she would feel a little foolish singing along to a record in front of people- never mind it was family and we had to listen to her sing along to her radio at the top of her lungs in her room- and she had an image to protect. Ok, well, this performance was in a downward spiral and obviously was going to close before it even opened. So, here are two people, trying to play the roles of approximately 15 people (don't forget the nuns in "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria" and Reverend Mother in "Climb Every Mountain" and of course, Rolf in "Sixteen Going on Seventeen"). Seriously, if I had to take on Liesl how was Tanya going to lift me during that song? Well, needless to say, much to the disappointment of our audience we had to close the curtains on our production of "The Sound of Music." My dreams of being an Academy Award winning Actress and Director shattered, I took my record off the hi-fi and went to the back bedroom and put on "Climb Every Mountain" to practice for my next career choice... Opera Singer.