This entry was originally published at Every Tomorrow

When I was in third and fourth grade, I started listening to a lot of show tunes. It was probably due to the fact that I was spending a considerable amount of time in the summers playing with Nicole, the daughter of the owners of the business my mother works for, and the music she listened to was mostly show tunes….

In many cases, I knew the lyrics to various musicals long before I ever saw a stage or movie adaptation, and usually Nicole and I had performed our own adaptation of the musical based on the stories the various songs told.

I was captivated by several musicals over the years…. Oklahoma, Brigadoon and The Music Man being three big ones…. but none quite the way that I was captured by The Sound of Music. It was one of the few soundtracks we already owned prior to my obsession with musicals… We actually owned two copies of it… One on Vinyl and the other on CD. I listened to the soundtrack constantly. I’m not sure whether I saw a stage adaptation or the movie first… The stage adaptation that I saw was put on by one of the community theater groups and my music teacher played Mother Abbess and the daughter of my kindergarden teacher understudied as Brigitta. I remember that my Uncle Bob was working at a video store at the time and he rented me the movie… (This was notable because it was the first rented movie I ever had…. My family never rented movies).

Sometime in the fourth grade, I discovered the school library had The Story of the Trapp Family Singers by Maria Augusta Trapp in it’s collection. I became obsessed with the book.

The movie and the real story are far far different. Names were changed for the movie, birth order slightly changed, important details left out for simplicity and basically the vast majority of movie is contained in the first five chapers of the book.

In fact, as a child, I never really read much past chapter five and the book was well above my reading level so it’s kind of a wonder I managed to read even that much of the book…. It was one of those books that I checked out every school year at least once and reread the first five chapters. Sometime shortly after I graduated the 8th grade, the librarian discarded the book from the library and gave it to me seeing as I was the only one that ever read it.

For some reason, I was inspired to pick it up again… I’m finding it a much easier read after four years of Catholic school under my belt and two semesters worth of German.

Maria almost became a nun, so she often talks in great detail about Catholic traditions… I remember struggling terribly with chapter 4 as a child because she talks so much about Advent, growing up nominally Protestant, a tradition I was completely unfamiliar with and had great difficulty understanding until I experienced it in high school.

Also, the book (mostly) takes place in Austria, a German speaking country. Maria occasionally drops the occasional German phrase or word into the book… When you’re 10, this is a larger stumbling block than it is when you’re 22.

Maybe this time, I’ll actually finish the book.