“The Sound of Music” – A Novitiate’s Impressions

Somehow I made it this far in life without seeing “The Sound of Music” the whole way through. My own mother saw it in a Detroit theater in 1965, so I’m not sure how I missed getting it burned into my brain at a young age. But I parked myself in an antique movie theater seat for three hours recently to watch this beloved musical, and it was a spiritual journey complete with nuns. As usual, I had a lot of questions, especially: why did Julie Andrews not win all the Oscars for this? The Dame almost got blown right off a mountain by a helicopter while singing her heart out, and the Academy just didn’t care. Other than that oversight, here are some other impressions upon seeing this movie for the first time.

1. Nuns won’t hesitate to roast you down into hell

It has come to my attention that movie nuns get the sickest burns. They may already be married to the son of God, but they are also endowed with the incalculable power of Ya Burnt. Maria is a problem that just can’t be solved, and they let us know. While discussing her incorrigibility, Reverend Mother responds to the search for the wayward nun with a curt “Sister, considering it’s Maria, I suggest you look in someplace unusual.” They had also likened her to a cow in an earlier burn. Then the nuns conclude a litany of her faults with a simple “Maria’s not an asset to the abbey.” My face melted off. These Jesus brides are singing a nice little song but it’s going to take a while for me to recover from their barbs. Nuns can see right through your shenanigans and don’t you forget it.

Also, at the end of the movie, they stealthily steal car parts from Nazis so they can’t chase the Von Trapps, so they win at history, too. (“Reverend Mother, I have sinned.”)

Bonus: Marni Nixon gets her only film appearance here in the flesh as Sister Sophia. (She had done voice work for Audrey Hepburn (“My Fair Lady”), Debra Kerr (“The King and I”), and Natalie Wood (“West Side Story”), among others.) It does make me sad that she has to appear in a nun costume, her visage partly obscured. Force of habit, I guess.

2. 1938 Austria was a fashion paradise

I’m pretty sure the historical accuracy of this is questionable, but apparently everyone in pre-WWII Austria had some fabulous frocks. Even their drapes could be used for fashion purposes. The dresses in this movie are just so good (thank you, Dorothy Jeakins). Let’s start with Maria’s novice dress – nothing too special, but it had big pockets and the skirt was roomy enough for frolicking in the mountains as an escape from external restrictions so I stan it as a feminist fashion moment. Defy the patriarchy with your clothes and then take over the system, I say. Then there are the nuns’ habits, which do count – one must be practical but fabulous for Jesus.

Liesl’s pink dress – let’s forget about her falling in love with a Nazi for a second to appreciate this confection. It fits her character so well. Seems a little risque for a sixteen-year-old in the 1930s but again, we are not going to talk about what the late 1930s in Austria was really like.

Curtain clothing – just the fact that Maria took a page from Scarlett O’Hara’s book and used drapes to make a defiant sartorial statement is enough. I do wonder how she managed to make seven outfits for different-sized children seemingly overnight – is the abbey a secret sweatshop?

Maria’s I am the Captain Now dress – also appears like former upholstery but she gets to drape herself all over Christopher Plummer while wearing it, so it fits the scene.

The Baroness’s Satan dress – I know everyone hates her but she rises to the occasion and dresses like the villain she is, complete with cigarette holder. This red sparkly vision showcases her dishy devilry. I choose to believe her hairstyle was meant to mimic devil horns.

Maria’s I’m Your Mom Now suit – Julie Andrews somehow makes mustard yellow and bell sleeves look chic. She’s married to a man who drives boats so she has to look the part.

Maria’s wedding dress – I like to think the nuns made this for her because it is divine. It’s got a mock turtle/V-neck going on and seems like an homage to Grace Kelly’s own wedding dress from 1956. The veil whispers over the train and everyone faints. It’s a fairy tale in God’s house. Which reminds me: why do the nuns have to stay behind the cathedral grate? Are they prone to rage in the cage? Are they afraid to accidentally get shadow married to the Captain? Additionally, did the Austrian pope marry them? Did no one tell him the Papal Schism ended in 1417?

3. Christopher Plummer’s hair is a supporting character

The Captain spends a lot of time in Vienna, ostensibly on official business doing boat stuff and unofficial business romancing the Baroness (boo). I think there’s more to the story, because those caramel highlights didn’t come from nowhere. The Captain is straight out the salon with one of the best haircuts 1938 could buy. I don’t think he could have put in this performance without it, as he and his coiffure do some top-rate cinematic giggling and winking. (I’m also a bit confused about his role in the Austro-Hungarian Navy but I’ll let that slide.)

4. The famous “Lonely Goatherd” puppets are amazing but terrifying

I’m sure these puppets took many hours to make and follow some sort of storied Austrian tradition, but they will haunt my dreams forevermore. There is lipstick on these goats. The mountain men are carrying pick axes and seem kind of murder-y. Two balding dudes at a table elongate their necks like a premonition of “Exorcist” nightmares to come. The lonely goatherd song is delightful and I can’t get enough of the yodeling, but this scene scares me more than nun burns. Also, how did Maria teach seven children from ages 5 to 16 perfect, intricate puppetry? Did any of them suffer from night terrors as a result of interacting with these beautifully made, scary-as-hell marionettes?

5. How did no one die from being blown off an Alp by a helicopter?

I’m not a pilot but I have seen “Mission: Impossible – Fallout” more than once and those helicopters generate a lot of wind. Picture yourself climbing up a mountain with one of those machines flying alongside you – how do you stay upright? How did Julie Andrews not perish from the earth because the blades were whipping wind at her so hard? And then when the Family Von Trapp (spoiler alert) escapes the Nazis over the mountains at the end, one would think a whole line of children would be like helicopter bowling. Yet another reason Dame Andrews should have gotten her Oscar for this movie. She put herself in grave danger and didn’t get the gold. She would go on to win for “Mary Poppins,” and thanked America and Walt Disney in her speech. Dame went high. No helicopter can blow her off the lofty perch she sits on.

Put Some Swash in That Buckle: Princesses, Brides, and the Story of Everything

I think about “The Princess Bride” probably every day. I don’t especially care if that’s too much; it’s a pair of lungs to me now. So it was an unexpected loss of air to hear that its storyteller, William Goldman, recently passed away. I never knew this person, but his work was a joy that seeped into my own life.

My love for this movie (and the book that preceded it) is complete and all-encompassing. Its lines and ethos permeate all of my days – my need to rhyme with “peanut,” my knowledge to never get involved in a land war in Asia, my tendency to overuse the word “inconceivable” even in the most conceivable of situations. Buttercup and Westley gave me a love that’s as fun as it is deep. A sense of humor is key when dealing with the forces of evil. The Dread Pirate Roberts knows this.

I’m not sure of the precise moment “The Princess Bride” arrived in my life; like most lasting cultural touchstones, it seems to transcend origin and simply exist across planes of time. My existence has always been wrapped around a VHS tape that brought me this story. I know it came to my family’s house one Christmas, but I don’t remember its manger-like presence under the tree. My awareness came later. I’m not positive on when I first popped that tape into our tiny white TV unit, that moment of discovery. I do know I’ve never been the same.

*Inconceivable!*
*You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.*

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Book Time: October Titles

There There – Tommy Orange

When Tommy Orange writes, speaks, or generally puts anything out into the universe, you should pay attention. Just the first dozen pages of “There There” are enough to jolt you to rapt observance – in that space alone, he lasers through centuries of wrongs against Native American people, across continents. Orange zeroes in on the contemporary urban space: “…nothing is original, everything comes from something that came before, which was once nothing. Everything is new and doomed. We ride buses, trains, and cars across, over, and under concrete plains. Being Indian has never been about returning to the land. The land is everywhere or nowhere.”

At the very least, here is a voice big enough for the Grand Canyon, booming and bitingly philosophical, yet precise enough to convey the particularities of people with both named and unnamed trauma.

In his debut novel, Orange follows a range of Native Americans through Oakland, California, as they converge on a powwow at the city’s Coliseum. He has created people who want to forget, discover, hide, be seen, who grieve but find ways to make it through the world, who have been ascribed a restricted identity by a country that still doesn’t let them create one for themselves.

Orange gives life to a wide array of characters struggling with these identities. At one point, one of them flies a drone into the open top of the Coliseum to take in the scene – Orange is a drone himself, a flyer who has only just begun to show what he can do.

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Earl, Aerial

He was a boy in a plane.

It was 1945, and Earl Brindley took pictures in the sky. Of factories and formations, groups of hulking but graceful planes and the patterns of buildings they flew over.

My grandfather was a member of a ten-man crew flying B-17s over Europe in the last, bitter winter and spring of World War II. He was the radio operator, communicating the location of both his plane and the others in the formation. He would also have to man a rear-facing .50-caliber gun, and take photos on missions. So it was part of his job to document this war, and a changing face of combat.

Earl’s outfit, the Eighth Air Force, was a new kind of operation. Instead of carrying out bombing missions at night, as was standard, they were to attack Germany during the day, open to counterattack by the Luftwaffe’s deadly forces. The B-17 was a new kind of bombing aircraft designed for these missions, meant to carry heavy loads over long distances. Boeing had worked to create this aerial battleship – its Vice President, Clairmont L. Egtvedt, described “searching for a flying dreadnought.” Upon seeing the B-17 on one of the first flights, a journalist dubbed it the “flying fortress.”

Attacking by daylight would allow bomber crews more accuracy on their targets – railways, factories, and other war mechanisms of the enemy. To avoid the anti-aircraft guns, the B-17 had to be able to fly into the stratosphere. At these heights, crews endured combat conditions both common across military situations, but ratcheted up by the rigors of flight: extremely high altitude, cold like nowhere on earth, bombardment from all sides (fire from both anti-aircraft guns on the ground and fighter planes in the air), and incredible noise: all rammed into a reinforced steel cylinder rocketing through the sky. They flew into the unknown.

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Book Time: September Titles

Lightning round!

The Incendiaries – R.O. Kwon

Phoebe lost her mother, Will lost his faith. When they meet at college, these losses congeal into extremes. Kwon writes devastatingly well about manifested pain.

Normal People – Sally Rooney

Rooney is my pick for the best chronicler of modern life. Nothing and everything happen in the truest, barest portrait of relationship I’ve read.

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup – John Carreyrou

This is a story that shakes your neck off your spine: a woman in Silicon Valley has an idea for better blood testing, but takes it to a dangerous level of deception, raising millions of dollars in funding while lying about the technology’s progress (or lack thereof), deceiving her board (which consisted of people like General James Mattis and Henry Kissinger), and terrorizing her employees. While she did a bad bad thing, there is also something thrilling/chilling about what Elizabeth Holmes was doing in the male-saturated tech world.

The Ensemble – Aja Gabel

Gabel explores how family and closeness play themselves out in a classical quartet – in each of the members’ individual lives, and the life of the group itself. I had high hopes for this book, but it wasn’t as satisfying a bouquet as the cover depicts. Still, it was worth it for the musical references alone.

Transcription – Kate Atkinson

Read everything Atkinson gives you. “Transcription” probes the mundanities of war that mix with the overall drama, buoyed by a dry sense of humor.

Juliet, Naked – Nick Hornby

In a long-term relationship with a man obsessed with former cult musician Tucker Crowe to the exclusion of almost everything else, Annie wonders if life has anything more to offer. I saw a movie poster for this before I read the book and couldn’t help but picture Ethan Hawke in the role of Tucker. I think it improved the experience.

Obsessed – Part 2: The Sloth is a Lonely Hunter

There is so much weirdness I think about all the time, varied and seemingly disparate things running through my mind. (I am large, I contain multitudes.) I’ve always been inclined to dig further into the shiny bits and bobs that catch my eye, but what about when those things are…not too deep to begin with? For example, what stupid phrases could I caption every medieval painting in this gallery with? What happens when a stalagmite would rather be a stalactite? Why does pro tennis player John Isner appear both extremely boring and also evil as he is tall (6’10”)? I don’t shy away from this, as anyone I’ve ever talked to has learned. I’ve embraced the shallows. I’ll forever be drawn to what are perhaps life’s dumber moments, its lower brows, its cruise ship-caliber offerings. And I need an outlet for these preoccupations. This is part of a series of dispatches from the Mixed-up Files of Ms. Claire G. Brindley.

There are a lot of good things about the nature series “Planet Earth.” Sweeping earthly vistas. Important records of the world’s wonders. Dazzling sea creatures. Lizards that have to run from scary-fast snakes just to go to the beach. But my favorite part is less a visual smorgasbord of natural beauty and animal ingenuity and more a soap opera. It’s trouble in paradise.

It’s the Islands episode of Planet Earth II. We’re on Escudo off the coast of Panama. Everything is beautiful and nothing hurts, except looking at the sky because it’s so dazzlingly blue. Enter the sloth (or “slooth” as David Attenborough intones). We’ll call him Slooth John B.

Our hairy hero…

The camera swoops over the tiny island in all its jewel tones. Sunlight filters through neon-tropical green leaves and shimmers up waterways. David tells us we’ll see “the extreme lengths animals go to survive.” Here we have a variation on that theme: what happens when a man pygmy three-toed sloth loves a woman pygmy three-toed sloth very much? A special sloth hug? Let David tell you.

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Book Time: August Titles

Didn’t quite reach my quota this month, but did spend some quality time with these pages.

Night School – Lee Child

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Let me tell you something about Jack Reacher. I am in deep, unapologetic love with this man. I will follow him wherever he goes, from tiny towns in American nowhere to more far-flung destinations, nod along as he breaks down every move in his fights against bad men. (Hand-to-hand combat comes up a lot.) Jack can devine the motives and next moves of any criminal just by which door he uses to exit the building. Everything is black and white and gray is a color reserved for mood-setting weather. He always eats in diners because of the sturdy coffee mugs and favorable calorie-to-cost ratio, and the fact that he usually uses them to either receive or stage missions, or take out a few criminals.

Jack is a 6’5”, 250-pound itinerant ex-military cop, moving through the world with one spartan outfit, a travel-size toothbrush, and a mean right hook. He’s basically a Viking: “I think ninety-nine of us grow up to love the campfire, and one grows up to hate it. Ninety-nine of us grow up to fear the howling wolf, and one grows up to envy it. And I’m that guy.” Did I mention Jack is the main character in an eponymous series by Lee Child? Well, I’m addicted.

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Obsessed – Part 1: The Peculiar Magic of George Washington Memes

There is so much weirdness I think about all the time, varied and seemingly disparate things running through my mind. (I am large, I contain multitudes.) I’ve always been inclined to dig further into the shiny bits and bobs that catch my eye, but what about when those things are…not too deep to begin with? For example, what stupid phrases could I caption every medieval painting in this gallery with? What happens when a stalagmite would rather be a stalactite? Why does pro tennis player John Isner appear both extremely boring and also evil as he is tall (6’10”)? I don’t shy away from this, as anyone I’ve ever talked to has learned. I’ve embraced the shallows. I’ll forever be drawn to what are perhaps life’s dumber moments, its lower brows, its cruise ship-caliber offerings. And I need an outlet for these preoccupations. To borrow from one of my first obsessions, what follows the first in a series of dispatches from the Mixed-up Files of Ms. Claire G. Brindley.

I can’t learn about history without trying to insert a voice into historical figures’ heads. I can’t go to museums or landmarks without wanting to know what all the people involved were really thinking. Take when my sister and I recently went to Glensheen in Duluth, MN – we lost our minds making up things for the people in the old mansion’s paintings to say. (Try it sometime at a historic estate near you; it’ll really spice things up.) We probably remember so much more about the place’s history than we would have otherwise, albeit through a crazy lens of our own imaginings. This is why George Washington memes are so amusing and absorbing to me.

The internet tells me that these words in Comic Sans imposed on historical renderings of a certain Founding Father are called “Sassy George Washington.” Not what I’d prefer to call them – I like to think that these are the kinds of thoughts that went through the man’s brain as he commanded forces in the Revolutionary War, crossed the Delaware on a fancy barge, and struck epic poses for history. Through it all, he gets annoyed at his coworkers, has mad donut cravings, and he just wants to dance. So more like “George is just like us.”

In this world, Washington is a crabby man-child who would like some animal crackers and some peace. A vaunted figure is brought down a few pegs, but not to any detriment. (You can read more about how many enslaved people lived at Mount Vernon over the years for that.) Far from an idealized figurehead, he’s way more fun in these memes, a flawed human who could use a nap after ushering a new nation into the world. Midwifery is hard work, George would like you to know.

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Book Time: July Titles

In which I somehow read three memoirs and the last installment of a favorite trilogy.

The Liars’ Club – Mary Karr

Born in East Texas in the mid-1950s, Mary Marlene Karr grew up surrounded by deadly forces and beings – hurricanes, blazing heat, the oil industry, poisonous snakes, spiders, giant rats, alligators, stinging jellyfish, undertow. Her childhood was an extended calamity. But other people were perhaps the most dangerous creatures.

Memories were deadly, too, as they both evaded and invited inspection into past tragedy. Karr wastes no time getting to the butcher knife- and sheriff-rousing-type episodes of her youth, and circles this element of recollection. Some points in her life are almost too painful to be fully known, yet call out for it: “When the truth would be unbearable the mind often just blanks it out. But some ghost of an event may stay in your head, then, like the smudge of a bad word quickly wiped off a school blackboard, this ghost can call undue attention to itself by its very vagueness. You keep studying the dim shape of it, as if the original form will magically emerge. This blank spot in my past, then, spoke most loudly to me by being blank. It was a hole in my life that I both feared and kept coming back to because I couldn’t quite fill it in.” A central weight in Karr’s writing is cultivating fading but extant memories and telling stories about them.

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Lightning: After-image

It’s funny which things from the past are embedded there, like moths in amber, visible but immobile, and which things jump out and demand to be known again.

The spirit of this photograph is strong as ever. It is mysterious and commanding, with lightning strikes of memories. It houses an ectoplasm that keeps it moving through realms.

I fully believe this spirit is there. It breathes. When I look at this image, its motion captivates me. My grandpa Earl dashes forward, his arms wide, beguiling a jumping dog. Another dog leaps down from a tree split in half, the trunk bent and the blond wood exposed. It appears lightning-struck, a sudden change in form. The photo’s simple mysteries unfold in a long-forgotten summer day. Handwriting on the back indicates it’s July 1984, and the feeling of wonder from that day is preserved.

The dogs and Earl are in the backyard of my grandparents’ house in Atlantic, Iowa. The scene emanates the ghosts of a heated thunderstorm, the morning after a heavy rain and lightning fest ripped the night open. I’m not sure who took the photo – perhaps my aunt, as those are her dogs frolicking around the frame. The lens captures such a sweet ceremony, a joy that Earl bestowed on the things he loved. That joy streams through the decades, the love sustaining a family.

This image is a window I frequent – its energy is still strong, it depicts a realm I want to embody. The ectoplasm inhabits the photograph, manifesting a spirit I am always trying to conjure. I want to know how the lens came to freeze this particular moment, limbs and paws midair, the tree’s raw insides opened up. The person on the other side of the camera somehow knew.

The spirit dances inside this photo, just as Earl did that day in July. The storm’s energy is still in the air, and the dogs nip it up, reveling in Earl’s presence. Maybe I put as much voodoo in this image as I believe is there, but it still holds power.