Gabrielle, Mary, Ryan and I all watched The Sound of Music this weekend.  It's the first time I've seen it since I've had seven children, and let me tell you, it's a lot of fun to imitate Maria saying when asked if she liked children, "Well, yes, but SEVEN?!"  My husband and I amused ourselves by saying things like, "Can you imagine, seven children in one family!" and "Who would be crazy enough to have seven children in this day and age?"

Watching the movie was nostalgic for me, because I visited Salzburg back in 1994 with my friend Cathy.  We wanted to go on a day trip from Munich, so we went to the train station and looked at various destinations and then said, "Let's go to Salzburg!"  Neither of us remembered until we got there and saw the inevitable tourist stuff in the train station that the Sound of Music was filmed in Salzburg.  We loved finding places that had appeared in the movie. 

The Sound of Music is my father's favorite movie, and so I wanted to go back with him some day and do the whole Sound of Music tour.  I had to face the fact this weekend that this is unlikely to happen.  Even if I could go now, he can't, and in five to ten years when I could go, who knows if he will be able to.  It seems to me as though everyone is aging faster.  I think maybe a midlife crisis is when you go from thinking "Someday I will..." to "It's now or never!" 

This was Ryan's first viewing of the movie and I made him go to bed at the intermission.  The next day he asked to watch the rest and I asked him where he had stopped.  He said, "The lady who taught the seven children to sing had just left the house."  I was impressed, both with his grammar and his description, because I knew exactly where he meant.

Another thing that struck me about the movie was how Liesl, the one who is "16 going on 17," is the only one who is portrayed as an adolescent or almost grownup.  Louisa is 13 and she is seen as still being a little girl.  How I wish things were still like that today!  I was also wondering how exactly they made Julie Andrews look different after the wedding.  Is it her makeup, her style of clothing, or is she just that good of an actress?  Before the wedding she is still so naive and unsure, and then after the wedding she is more mature and confident.  Of course, by then she is sure of the Captain's love, and that makes a big difference.

I still like the movie even though I know that there are all sorts of things wrong with it.  The von Trapps didn't make really any money from it, they didn't walk over the mountains to escape the Nazis, the children's names were different, etc, etc.  And folks, look at a map of Europe - you cannot walk over the Alps to Switzerland from Salzburg.  But despite all that, it's still a great movie.

Which brings me to my most controversial point.  For years I have been alone in admiring Baroness Schrader.  I really like her character.  I think she's witty and charming and dresses impeccably.  Everyone thinks she's evil because she comes between the Captain and Maria.  But she really may have been trying to do the best for everybody.  For the Captain, who was a noble and a decorated war hero, to marry an orphaned nobody would have been shocking.  And Maria was supposed to be a nun.  How was the Baroness to know that it wasn't just an infatuation? Once Maria came back and it was clear that the Captain really loved her, the Baroness bowed out gracefully instead of scheming.  As for sending the children to boarding school, that certainly was very common among the upper classes in those days.

My dad used to say that he liked getting older because he could do so many things again for the first time.  Watching the Sound of Music again proves that because life is always changing, what you can get out of a movie is always changing too!