I hate The Sound of Music.

There, I’ve said it, I feel better now. Ahhh.

Charlie has been asking to watch it, and you know that I would rather put the kids in front of TV than actually have to PLAY with them, so I’ve been obliging (no, not really, but by 5:00 I am all preschoolered out, and it’s a good excuse to eat more Poppycock) and we have been revelling in the lovely tones of Julie Andrews and those kids. Ugh, THOSE KIDS. I hear those voices and I want to throw up (which, by the way, Julie Andrews DID, a couple of times, filming that opening scene, the one where she spins around on the mountain. Too much spinning, too much helicopter-mounted camera, too much Rodgers and Hammerstein).

I used to loooooove this movie; the singing, the dancing, the costumes, the beautiful views of Austria. But now it just irritates the holy hell out of me. We have probably seen it a thousand times in the last three years, I kid you not.* My children know every song and every step of choreography. Henry can recite most of the dialogue. And the other night, Wade was pointing out that every outdoor scene in the first half of the film is framed to include a mountain. Watch for it–it’s there. Then we started talking about what the mountain might represent (the Captain’s Austrian nationalism? Maria’s Catholicism? everyone’s thinly-veiled horniness?) and Henry shushed us. ‘I can’t hear them talking!’ he lamented. Sigh.

Henry had an intense Sound of Music obssession when he was three. He liked to pretend that he was Maria, which included dressing up; he would bring me a receiving blanket and a binder clip and ask me to make him a ‘blankie dress’ (we actually had to make a rule that the ‘blankie dress’ was for home ONLY; he wanted to wear it everywhere, which freaked Wade out. I was just annoyed because the binder clip fell off every ten seconds and had to be put back on again, which was too much work for me). Once he was ‘dressed,’ he would spin around in our family room until he fell down. Or he would renact the ‘I Have Confidence’ song (which was written for the film and is a crime against the original score). He would insist that I be Liesl and Wade be the Mother Superior. We were glad when he outgrew that phase.

Charlie is a more conventional movie viewer; he sits on the sofa with his binkit and sucks his thumb and snuggles and eats Poppycock and says things like, ‘Look, Mommy, a FOUNTAIN! Do you see it?’ It would be so cute if we were watching ANYTHING ELSE. But this movie drives me batty.

Why? you ask. The implausibility! I don’t mean the musical convention of everyone bursting into song and dance at the slightest provocation; I mean things like Maria’s shock that Captain Von Trapp and his first wife had seven children. Come on, this is the 30s! They’re Catholic! OF COURSE they had seven children (I think, in real life, they had more like nine; then the Captain and Maria went on to have three or six or ten more. Something like that). Or that we never see Maria do a single educational thing with those kids. That’s what governesses did–taught. Yes, I know, it messes up the flow of the musical. Whatever.

But my real complaint is this: I have a difficult time finding things that will occupy both my three-year-old and my five-year-old. But Maria is able to engage everyone from five-year-old Gretel to 16-year-old Liesl (who is one rainstorm away from being either a single mother or an Aryan Youth recruit, by the way) with this singing thing? I don’t buy it. And it annoys me to no end.

My favorite character, these days, is the Baroness Schraeder (the sexy one, who ALMOST marries the Captain), if only because she utters what has become one of my favorite movie lines ever: ‘Haven’t you ever heard of a little thing called boarding school?’ Ahhh, the old days. So wonderful.

*The boys have actually only seen the first half of the movie, up to the point where Maria runs away to the Abby because she’s hot for the Captain. I just can’t face explaining the Nazis to my kids, not yet. Wade has shown them the last minute or so, when they are crossing the Alps, and every once in a while the boys ask to see the Von Trapps ‘go hiking.’ Like they were out for a picnic and not running for their lives. And you think they would have put some long pants on Kurt and Friedrich when they fled the Nazis, wouldn’t you? But no. Just one more thing that annoys me.