When my wife and I first started dating, she suggested we head up to the Trapp Family Lodge in Vermont for a romantic ski getaway.
I had no clue what the place was supposed to be about, because I had no idea who the von Trapps were. Whenever The Sound of Music came on the tube, I switched the channel. Little did I know that TSoM was scripture to my future wife, and a trip to the Family Lodge a kind of pilgrimage (Mecca was, of course, in Salzburg). Anyhow, a trip to Vermont in winter sounded nice, so I said “Sure. I’d love to go to a lodge.”
After getting unpacked, we decided to go for an afternoon jaunt around the Lodge’s extensive Nordic ski center. At one point we passed a small cemetary plot, and my future wife grabbed my arm to stop me.
“There,” she said in a reverent tone “is where Maria and Georg are buried.”
“Who?”
You should have seen the look she gave me. She stood there, having caught her breath, her face a pale, horrorstruck expression.
“Who? Who???”
“Errrr, I’m sorry. Are they your relatives?”
“What!?!?”
“OK, I’m really confused now…”
“You don’t know who Maria and Georg von Trapp are??”
“Well…I guess they must have been the owners of the Lodge, right?”
“NO! Well, yes, they were the owners, but…but you don’t know who they are?”
“Should I?”
“The Sound of Music???”
I stared at her blankly.
“They were the nun and the Baron in the TSoM!!”
“I’ve never seen it.”
“Never seen it??”
“Umm. No. I never went for that sort of thing…musicals. Can’t stand them, really.”
My wife’s passion is musical theater.
She was flabbergasted, and I was baffled by her reaction. We must have skied in silence for an hour before she was able to recover her equilibrium enough to accuse me of lying about TSoM and having never seen it. It took a week before she would believe me when I said I knew nothing about it except that Mary Poppins was in it, and that I hated Mary Poppins, so I naturally avoided TSoM as well. Not that belief made her feel any better. Poor woman, she really had the hots for me, and this revelation about my philistine, heathen attitudes had rocked her poor world to its very foundations. Needless to say, I was on probation from that moment forward, until she’d sat me down in front of the TV and popped the tape in the VCR. No boyfriend of hers was going to remain a TSoM virgin. A couple years later she dragged me to “The Sound of Music Sing Along”* at the Coolidge Corner Theater. I think my participation and approval was a pre-requisite for marriage.
*Imagine TSoM and a midnight viewing of Rocky Horror Picture Show all wrapped up into one…while following the bouncing ball. Surreal.