The Inexorable Sound of Music or How a Lonely Goatherd Came to Run Amok in My Brain

For many people The Sound of Music isn't just a classic musical or one of Hollywood's all-time money-makers, for them it is beloved. If you are one of these people please don't take offense at the things I am about to say. I like TSOM, too. At least I used to and I probably will again. Right now...

One day last year I was entering some sweepstakes online when I came across a contest sponsored by a local radio station. The object was to write parody lyrics to the song "My Favorite Things" from TSOM and tailor them to Chicago, my hometown. I jotted off these lyrics in about ten minutes:

Mustard on hot dogs and thick crusts on pizza
Sixteen-inch softball it's easy, I'll teach ya
Going downtown just to look at the bean
These are my favorite Chicago things

Reading the Tribune, Sun-Times and the Reader
Someone named Daley is always our leader
Hot summers, cold winters, without any springs
These are my favorite Chicago things

When the snow falls
When the Cubs stink
When the "el" shuts down
I simply remember my favorite things
Coz Chicago's my kind of town!

Then I forgot about it. A month later I get a phone call at work from the radio station. I'm a finalist and I have to go down to Grant Park and sing my entry in front of the thousands assembled to view an outdoor screening of TSOM. The rest of that night at work I have a mild panic attack but after that I'm fine. I spend the entire week rehearsing, singing my Chicago version of "My Favorite Things" dozens and dozens of times every day. I go down to Grant Park at the end of the week and meet the two very nice, talented people I'll be competing against. I'm relaxed because I figure I probably won't be the one winning the grand prize, a trip to Austria to take the TSOM tour, but all three of us are going to win pretty nice prize packages. Well, I was wrong -- I did win the trip, so fast forward to this September when I finally go.

It was a long trip to Salzburg from Chicago. A half hour car ride to O'Hare, a ten-hour flight to Vienna, a three-hour train ride to Salzburg and finally a twenty-minute hike to our hotel. I didn't get a single wink of sleep the whole time. I was pretty punchy the whole time I'm there. When I checked into the hotel they handed me the voucher for the TSOM bus tour. Up in the room going through the channels on the TV almost all are in German except for the last channel which shows TSOM on a loop, 24 hours a day. Naturally I leave it on. With the jet lag I'm sleeping odd hours and waking up at odd hours. Only one way to fill those hours -- TSOM! On the bus tour not only do we see many of the places where the movie I've been watching over and over for the last 48 hours was filmed but they're nice enough to play some of the sound track on the bus sound system. By the time I get back to Chicago I've got these songs running around in my brain like a musical NASCAR event. When I sit down at my piano these are the only songs that my fingers seem to know. I remained jet-lagged for a full week and the whole time I'm also suffering from the effect of Richard Rodgers' earworms. Now I'm slowly recovering from the musical short-circuiting of my neurons and I think I should be ready to enjoy TSOM by 2020 or so...

Anyway it was a great trip and I'm grateful to the Austrian Tourist Office and all the other sponsors of the contest as well as the people who applauded for me in Grant Park to send me on the trip. Thank you.

Last movie seen: The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942) TCM

Welcome...

Hello. I set up this blog for reasons other than a profound desire to blog but as long as I'm here I may as well write an entry or two now and then. My primary focus will be on movies but I will probably occasionally feel the need to write about other things. When I do I shall strive to relate those entries to movies somehow, no matter how tenuous the connection. If nothing else I may just put a note at the bottom of the post naming the movie I'd seen most recently before posting. Like this:

Last movie seen: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006) DVD

It's a Wonderful Reason to Cry

I cry at movies. I know it's not manly so I'm grateful for the darkness. I cried at the end of Red Dawn for Pete's sake. The ending of The Color Purple absolutely destroyed me. My friends made fun of me when we went to see it. They did not cry. What is wrong with me? Or what is wrong with them? I went to a sneak preview of Field of Dreams about a month before it came out. I had no idea what it was going to be about. As I sat there bawling my eyes out I heard the guy behind me laughing and telling his date that he saw someone was crying. I turned around to give him a dirty look and I saw that his girlfriend was already doing so. She was crying, too. So was just about everybody else. Not a dry eye in the house, they used to say, and in this case it was true except for the two belonging to the guy behind me. I'll always remember that moment because it was the one time I cried at the movies that I didn't feel alone and ashamed.

What brings all this up was a Christmas party I recently went to that was held by our local neighborhood association. It was held at a movie theater. They had pizza, pasta, cookies, a raffle and they showed It's a Wonderful Life on the big screen. I hadn't seen it in at least twenty years and had only seen it once, also in a movie theater. I knew it had an emotional ending and I still forgot to bring tissues. That was a bigger mistake than I realzied because I'd forgotten just how powerful earlier scenes in the move were, as well. When young George makes the druggist realize he'd made a mistake I was already off to the races. I found though that I'm now able to temper my emotion, some. Whenever I catch myself getting carried away I can now usually remind myself that it's just a movie and distance myself enough that my throat loosens up again. Of course that's after the floodgates have already been opened. I have a new favorite moment from It's a Wonderful Life, though. It's when Sheldon Leonard repeatedly opens and closes the cash register drawer making the bell ring again and again and callously says, "Look! I'm givin' 'em wings!" I'm laughing now just thinking about it.