just when you think something got buried for good...

It comes baaack!

Ok, ok, I have an allergy, or am algerian against this piece. It keeps coming back to haunt me over and over and over again..l. The music is lovely. Really. Some of it is such kitsch, you could retch. And now they are putting it on at the local opera house, and I am pissed off!

Now there are several reasons why I really get a bee in my bonnet about this. My godmother took me to see it when I was nine, and evening performance... ooo, that was cool. And we came away feeling cheered up and singing some songs from it. But that was at NINE...

That piece of treacle ran en suite for six months in a town of one hundred thousand people. It was cult.

Eventually, I forgot about it, of course. Till I arrived in Salzburg to find a place to stay in the Fall to study. Arrived in pouring rain, drenched to the skin at two in the a.m. with luggage for a year, and a receptionist took pity on me and gave me a room at the Hotel Pitter.

Next morning, I called my friend Susan to arrange a meeting, and fix a room for the Fall. My inner clock was so fucked up, my body didn't know where it was, but that is another story.

And btw... Salzburg gets an average of 265 days of rain a year. You can imagine what it does to the dispositions of the average citizen there. Sour....

BUT.... it was a lovely day after, and you could even see the mountains. Glorious view. So I followed instructions and headed across the park across the street, the Mirabelle Gardens... And was struck nearly blind with dejà vu. 'I've been here before', I thought...

There was a hill with a beautiful fortress on it, and the park before me, and I thought, 'why in the world does this look so familiar????' And then I went a little further, and I saw it... Two naked guys with their arms outstretched, pointing to one another over the exit. (Yeah, even subliminally, it caught my attention when I was NINE.)

And I thought, 'Oh shit, 'The Sound of Music. This is where I landed?'

I will not torture you with the nonsense I had to face every day in that city when it came to the 'true believers', and fanatics who were crazy about that film.

But it got weirder. I had a roommate who was very quiet. And one day in the Fall he asked me to go to dinner with him where his family used to work. He was a quiet, unpreposessing young man, we worked in Munich together, but he never talked about his past, you see.

So I just said 'ok..', was curious... and we bussed out to behind the hill with the fortress, and the place where he used to live... was the Palace of Leopoldskron, set on a small lake. The US took it over after the war, and held seminars for the brightest students in Europe on the most diverse topics.

His parents used to run those seminars. We had lunch on the terrace, overlooking the lake, with those horses just like in the fucking movie? And looked left and there was the glass summer house? Gawwd. Color me speechless.... Turns out his parents had run the program during the filming, and he knew Julie Andrews, and played ping-pong with the kids in it. At which point I was spitless. And THEN he showed me the sneakret door that led from the library to the then archbishop's bedroom.

It was a bit much to take in, believe me.

When I got back from my year abroad, what was the first thing I had to do at my work in a cinema? Being on duty inside the theater. And what was playing? 'The (Fucking) Sound of Music!) It was a curse, somehow...

Over the decades, I have had to deal with groupies who really truly believe that the song 'Edelweiß' from that is our national anthem. It is NOT. Ours is from Haydn.

And... 'The Sound of Music' flopped badly in Austria...just so you know... People still wrinkle their nose if you mention it. And Salzburg named a tiny street in Aigen after the von Trapp family... begrudgingly.

So... I cannot figure out why the local opera would want to put this on now, I really can't.

I am half-tempted to get a standing-room ticket and watch them burst into flames and crash.... And I still think the flash-mob version in Atwerp Begium was brilliant, and I know, I have posted it before, but it is a joy to watch.

It might even be worth it.