My Life in 6 Songs: Part IV- The Sound of Music

Friends and Sisters

Last week my sister and I drove over the mountains from her home near San Francisco to Las Vegas. It was a long, and grueling, and also very pretty trip. I got the first speeding ticket I have ever gotten in my life when we were streaking along in the Nevada desert night after having to stop for 1) a jackknifed big rig on the 2-lane Sonora Pass 2) multiple construction sites, and just trying to GET THERE. It was late. I was going too fast. There are burros on that road. 'Nuf said.

The reason for the trip was to reconnect with my childhood friend, Bonnie. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology and facebook, I was able to find her last year around Christmas. We have been emailing since, and had finally come up with a plan to meet in, of all places, Las Vegas.  She flew from our hometown, Rochester, New York, to Pensacola, Florida to meet up with HER sister and her sis's boyfriend. They slammed across the country in 36 hours in a Ford Taurus and got to Vegas several days before Lee and me, but we met them bright eyedthe next morning under the Arch d'Triomph of Gay Paris for breakfast.

The non-stop talkfest began immediately, and it was easy to remember why we had gotten in so much trouble as kids for talking during class. We caught up on classmates, family and each other. Bonnie's sister headed to the casinos after breakfast (she is very lucky and won lots of money) while Lee, Bonnie and I wandered from hotel bar to hotel bar in the 110 degree heat, sipping cold drinks, stopping into a few shops and talking all the while.

What does any of this have to do with The Sound of Music? Well, Bonnie and I were friends through the 10 years between 2nd grade and when I graduated and left town after 11th grade. She played clarinet and I played cello. Eventually I played tuba and French horn too. We sang in the choirs. We played in the pit orchestras. We were in every music group together for eight of those 10 years. We stomped around the snowy fields of our suburb, played Clue (she always won) and rode bikes, learned about sex from another girl hanging around the apple trees in the vacant lot and dated boys who were also best friends. We walked to school together in the predawn cold of a Rochester winter, except when her dad drove us to school in their Ford Falcon.  And the one thing that we shared all through those years was our love of music.

In about 5th or 6th grade, I became infatuated with two movies. The first was Mary Poppins. The soundtrack recording of this movie was one of the first records I ever owned. I knew every song, and could sing them with proper English pronunciations. I thought Julie Andrews was marvelous, and I wanted to BE her.

But there was another movie that Bonnie kept telling me about. She had the record and we listened to it over and over on her little stereo in a suitcase on the floor of her bedroom. THIS was the movie to end all movies. If you like Julie Andrews, you are going to LOVE this! Finally, I got to see The Sound of Music. I don't really even remember the circumstances of the actual viewing of the movie. But, yes, this movie had it ALL over Mary Poppins. It was for adults, a serious story, a love story. The songs were about adult things. Learning those songs, and singing them gave me glimpses into adult life. Nuns, Nazis, the Alps, teenage betrayals, a stern father relearning to love his children: this was epic.

Together, Bonnie and I learned The Lonely Goatherd, and performed it as a duet for our class during General Music class (yes, we had such a class in those days). I remember that she knew the words better than I. It was the silliest song in the whole show, and maybe that choice was a reflection of our not-yet-ready-to-leave-childhood state of mind, but The Sound of Music was a jumping off place for becoming my own musician. It was a grownup musical, unlike Mary Poppins, which was obviously for kids.

Until that time, the music I had listened to was pretty much the same as the music my parents listened to. Bonnie, in turning me on to SoM, became one of my first non-family music influences, and she and I continued to influence each other's musical experience through high school. When I think of anything having to do with music as a child, she is almost always there in my mind. As we chatted fast and furious in Las Vegas on a hot summer day in 2011, this influence came back into focus, and I felt reconnected not only to my childhood BF, but to my own musical roots.