Full Disclosure

Just ate an M&M off the floor. Also, can't stop thinking about "The Sound of Music" which aired on network tv last night. You all know the story, right? Young Fraulein Maria Wants-to-be-a-nun is sent by her convent's abbess to be governess for the emotionally dead dead dead Captain Von Trapp and his seven resentful offspring. Maria immediately brings MUSIC! back into his life. The Captain is so grateful he dumps his savvy, svelte rich blonde Baroness to marry the boyish Fraulein Maria with her love of sensible shoes and syrupy Tyrolean ballads. Sadly, I missed the first ten minutes of the movie so I didn't get to hear the gang of nuns back at the abbey dissing Maria in that song called How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria which incidentally we hear them sing at her wedding a mere three hours later! It's a fairly passive aggressive little ditty in which the other nuns all bond by making up mean stuff about Maria (...underneath her wimple...she wears curlers in her hair!--oh she does not--her hair is like two inches long!) before the Mother Superior kicks her out and sends her off to catch a bus to the Von Trapp compound. For her trip away from the convent Maria carries a carpet bag she stole from Mary Poppins and wears an odd, pieced-leather hat, sort of a snug fitting beanie with a huge floppy brim. Perfect for warding off rain and sun and attention from the opposite sex! I kid. She's totally cute and the hat is actually kind of appealing in a Curious George Man With the Big Yellow Hat kind of way

Anyway, I noticed a few little things I hadn't before, in all my many, many viewings of this classic musical starring the lovely and sexless Julie Andrews. Such as--oh my god, the butler is a Nazi! And an informer! He's constantly prowling around the Von Trapp mansion lifting an eyebrow and then before you know it there's a Nazi officer at the door asking probing questions about the Captain's sex life. Also, every single male cast member is outfitted in snug pants and was definitely directed to play it homosexual. Captain VonTrapp? Prissy and gay. Uncle Max? Flamboyant and gay. Fourteen-year-old Friedrich? Repressed and gay. Ten-year-old Kurt? Adorable and gay.

The movie is endless and is full of disturbing close-ups of Maria in which the Gaussian blur is so thick I kept turning the TV volume up so I could hear through it. Oh, but then the Captain gets behind the blur so they can smooch--just a little!--and rub foreheads together because that is spelled out in Julie's contract--"for every event where my lips must meet those of my co-star I stipulate no less than four(4) instances of upper cranial contact lasting at least twenty seconds." You just know Julie's kinky, in a sleep-with-stuffed-animals-until-she's-forty kind of way.

So what got me through the long, long LONG three hours of prancing and sneering from Captain Von Trapp (played by the perpetually annoyed Christopher Plummer)? Three solid hours of watching all seven Von Trapp children parade around outfitted in amazingly ugly "playclothes" that gifted needlewoman Maria whipped up from her bedroom curtains (um, Scarlett O'Hara ripoff or what)? Incidentally the "children" include a very sophisticated sixteen-year-old girl who spends the entire movie plotting to get her junior Nazi boyfriend (panicky and gay) to notice her. Tip--lose the chartreuse paisley-patterned apron-front dirndl, honey.

I don't know. I lay back on the pillows of my bed, tossing back cough drops in a contented stupor. The Sound of Music is just a beautiful movie. Those damn awesome alps, the camera swooping us here and there up amidst the clouds and down amongst the edelweiss. The charming town of Salzburg with its, its --is that a Roman Coliseum the family performs in? Amazing. The cobblestone streets and the old buildings and the perfectly symmetrical VonTrapp family house... just perfect. Oh and the gorgeous wedding in the enormous Gothic Abbey--sigh. It is all so ornate yet simple and lovely. I couldn't tear myself away, not even to watch Battle Tomato on Iron Chef. And when the entire family trudges across the Alps to Switzerland to escape the Nazis I sat straight up and drank in every detail of the scene. I cheered for them. They're going to make it! Hurrah for freedom! And lederhosen! Hurrah for strudel and schnitzel! And warm copper kittens! (Wait--how does that song go?)