Starry-Eyed

by Ted Michael

  The first scene plays just like the movie until they reach the song. When Amanda sees the stage direction reading, “The Nuns sing ‘Maria,’” she tosses the script aside and croons:

  “Ma-riiii-a . . .

  I just kissed a nun named Maria . . .”

  Not everyone gets the joke—including Aaron—but those who do think it’s hilarious, no one more so than Sterling, who laughs so hard he gets a nosebleed.

  It only takes a couple of days to learn the music because they’re singing in unison out of the Hal Leonard Vocal Selections. Their accompaniment is provided by Joni, who reluctantly parts from reading a collection of beat poetry to strum a guitar. Sterling complains that playing the whole show on guitar “doesn’t sound ANYTHING like the movie,” but Aaron likes that it’s “less Rodgers and Hammerstein and more Simon and Garfunkel.” Gale secretly agrees with Sterling, but enjoys any opportunity to watch Aaron’s very kissable mouth say anything.

  The two-week rehearsal period was a frenzy of activity, Gale practices for her memoirs, exciting, scary, Fresca-vein inducing. Whatever she does to prepare the show, there is Sterling next to her to help, eagerly skipping all other camp activities to aid in painting an Alpine landscape on the few existing flats or pick through the optimistically named Costume Shop. Together, they assemble nuns’ wimples and Nazi armbands, giddily making up fake lyrics:

  So long, farewell, our feet are saying good-bye . . .

  Climb ev’ry mountain, fall in every stream . . .

  I am sixteen, going on seventeen, I know that I’m not Eve . . .

  There’s not enough time or fabric to create dirndls and lederhosen out of curtains, so the von Trapp children remain in white Oxfords with blue sailors’ neckerchiefs. This lack of authenticity bothers Sterling, who quickly gets on everyone’s nerves by continually starting sentences with the phrase, “In the MOVIE . . .” He insists on wearing a nightshirt in the thunderstorm scene, which he accomplishes by auditioning several girls’ nightgowns, choosing the most masculine (not very), and drawing stripes on it with a magic marker.

  Since he knows every frame of the film, he becomes the unofficial choreographer, putting the campers in the unusual position of taking orders from a nine-year-old. But he speaks with such authority—not to mention multisyllabic words—that he earns their bewildered respect. Indeed, his exuberant demonstration of flit-float-fleetly-fleeing-fly will be remembered for years to come by all who witnessed it.

  “Far out,” Aaron says, not unkindly.

  Despite being the director, Gale often finds herself standing aside and watching Sterling, shaking her head in astonishment. His passion is irrepressible, spurting out of him like a soda can that’s been shaken. Secretly, she envies his flamboyance—never before has she met anyone who acts how she feels, who actually says what she thinks. Even here, in the shady sanctuary of the Drama Shack, she represses herself—standing sideways when she’s next to Barbie so she looks thinner; trying to control the pinball machine that’s her mind so she doesn’t keep insulting Aaron.

  Gale’s mouth: Hey, Nature Boy, you’ve got more hair on the tops of your feet than a Hobbit.

  Gale’s mind: Throw me down and kiss me, you mad beast.

  But Sterling laughs every time, the Best Audience Ever. (“A HOBBIT! That’s HILARIOUS! Amanda could be Gandalf—her voice is deep enough!”)

  As the pressure builds toward the performance, however, Sterling grows increasingly agitated. “No, no, no!” he cries as Gale starts to sing “Something Good” to Aaron. “You’re supposed to kiss BEFORE the song.”

  Gale tries to communicate telepathically with Sterling, widening her eyes to send a thought balloon reading, “Leave this alone.” Yes, she wants Aaron to kiss her. But it should happen naturally, easily, and then . . .

  Gale quivered with excitement, her bosom palpitating against his hairy chest as she left the loveless ranks of the unkissed behind her forever, her very essence entwining inexorably with that of her lover. . . .

  Sterling sighs ostentatiously, putting the kibosh on the romance novel in Gale’s mind. “In the MOVIE,” he says, “the Captain takes Maria’s face in both hands and kisses her before she sings—on the MOUTH.”

  This kid is not going to live to see ten, Gale thinks.

  Sterling continues. “Then at the end they stand in silhouette with Maria’s neck stuck out like one of those swivel desk lamps.” Sterling snaps his fingers at Joni. “Music! Let’s go back to before the song.”

  Joni shrugs, taking the command in stride. Being a pothead, nothing bothers her.

  “You have to stand close enough to touch,” Sterling says, “like Conrad does with Barbie.” This elicits laughter from the prepubescent Nazis, which only seems to annoy Sterling. “It’s TRUE,” he cries. “They’re like Siamese twins!”

  It’s moments like these that remind Gale that Sterling is only nine and doesn’t understand that We Don’t Talk About These Things.

  Aaron takes a couple of steps toward Gale, so at home in his taut, tawny skin. He smells of leather and sweat and romance.

  “We don’t have to do this now,” Gale says, addressing her sandals.

  “It’s okay,” Aaron says. His tender lips—well, she assumes they’re tender—curl upward in a shy smile, turning Gale’s legs to Jell-O. It’s going to happen. It’s really going to happen. Over Aaron’s shoulder, Gale spies the Jewish Nuns Chorus peeking around an Alp to watch.

  Aaron’s face is so close that Gale can see his pores, which somehow makes him seem even more irresistible.

  “I’m not going to marry the Baroness,” he says.

  “You’re not?” Gale replies, her voice scarcely a whisper.

  “How can I,” he continues, “when I’m in love with someone else?”

  It feels So Real. Gale’s heart beats everywhere in her body—behind her ears, between her shoulder blades, and in the arches of her feet. Aaron tilts his head toward hers. Gale closes her eyes and . . .

  “No, no, no!” Sterling shouts. “Grab her face. Grab. Her. Face.”

  Aaron reaches up with his whole hand, palming Gale’s face like she was a basketball. The spell broken, they both laugh.

  “Yeesh,” Sterling says. “You two are so immature.”

  . . . . .

  The remaining days fleetly flee and fly. Gale and Aaron never get around to practicing the kiss, making another joke of it during their one and only dress rehearsal. It will happen for the first time onstage—which is somehow less terrifying than the thought of kissing Aaron alone, yet also more terrifying because all of Camp Algonquin will be watching. Them’s lose-lose odds, says a bookie in her brain.

  The night of the show, Gale tries to make herself as pretty and kissable as possible, with the usual dispiriting results. With orange juice can curlers, a horse brush, and Immense Rigor, she can just manage to tame her willful hair into obedience. Makeup helps, but then again, the whole cast is wearing makeup, so the bar for prettiness is raised. Even the boys look lovelier.

  There is much hugging backstage. It feels like the show simply can’t start until every cast member has squeezed each and every person like they’re getting juice out of fruit. With at least two-dozen people buzzing about behind the scenes, Gale calculates that’s over five hundred hugs, though math isn’t her best subject. Still, it’s Affection Concentrate.

  Sterling zips around like a firefly, his face beaming bright in the twilight. He looks like how Gale feels, her internal pinball machine clanging and dinging inside her ribcage. Amanda pretends to smoke and drink shots because everything is funnier in a nun’s costume. One of the prepubescent Nazis does a card trick for the von Trapp children. On the other side of the flats on which she personally painted an Alpine vista, Gale can hear the fustery rustle of the gathering audience, the unmistakable sound of Expectation. She steps out the back of the Drama Shack for one last deep breath, perhaps a prayer to the Holy Nose.

  And then she sees them. Standing close. His hands cupping he
r face. French kissing. Barbie. Aaron.

  Even worse, they see her.

  The pair part, wiping their mouths.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid, Gale thinks, not narratively, just smacking herself with her thoughts. How could she ever think that Aaron would want to kiss her that way? They don’t even look guilty, so it’s obvious Aaron had no idea how Gale felt.

  “Break a leg,” Gale says, and does a little time-step the way Fanny does when she says good-bye to Nicky Arnstein for the first time in Funny Girl. Then she wheels around and heads straight for the Alps.

  . . . . .

  Onstage, alone, singing the opening number to Joni’s folky accompaniment, Gale feels safe again. She understands better than ever why Maria goes to the hills when her heart is lonely. The stage lights are warm on her face and she can feel the audience listening. It’s molecular. She doesn’t understand the physics, but she knows that something chemical is happening. Her voice floats into the air and onto the ears of the audience and into their bodies, filling them up until they release it back to her with applause. A scientist could fill a chalkboard breaking down the process.

  The show goes on.

  No one’s sure why the audience finds everything Amanda says funny. Maybe it’s because she delivers the Reverend Mother’s lines like she’s heading to the last round-up. But it’s okay. Both actors and audience are having a good time. Gale has confidence in sunshine, rain, and the campers of Camp Algonquin.

  Then the von Trapp children march in. They all look appropriately stern, with the notable exception of Sterling, who’s practically vibrating with excitement, the corners of his mouth twitching upward like there’s a bumblebee trying to get out. It’s obvious to Gale in an instant that he’s deliriously happy to be there. And repressing his enthusiasm is not his strong suit.

  Gale moves down the line, interviewing each child: Liesl, Friedrich, Louisa, and . . .

  “I’m Kurt. I’m INCORRIGIBLE!”

  To Gale’s surprise, the line gets a laugh, perhaps because Sterling screams it like he’s yelling “Fire!” in a crowded movie theater.

  But there’s an audible scoff from a red-headed, freckle-faced kid down front, plainly visible in the stage light. In a microsecond, Sterling’s jaw tightens and Gale feels her gut clench.

  Gale continues down the line to talk about pink parasols with Marta, but out of the corner of her eye she sees that the boy in the front row hasn’t let up and is mouthing the words “I’m incorrigible” for his sniggering bunkmates, batting his eyelashes and flapping his hands limp-wristedly.

  Gale moves on to the youngest, Gretl, determines that she’s five, then delivers Maria’s line about how Gretl is such a big girl.

  From the audience, the freckle-faced boy says, “So’s Kurt.”

  Gale’s whole body tenses, an animal in the wild sensing a predator. But before she’s had a moment to respond, it starts.

  Laughter. Excruciating, sweat-inducing laughter. The cast stands there, prisoners lined up for a firing squad, von Trapped. Down front, the freckle-faced demon smiles, pleased with himself as his two companions punch him in the arm approvingly, rolling backward with laughter. A cicada-like buzz moves through the crowd. Those who didn’t hear it are asking those that did, and the laughter burbles up again. Sensing that no one is putting out the spreading wildfire, Gale speeds through her lines, trying to end the scene as fast as possible.

  By the time the von Trapp children have exited, Jerry has lumbered down to the front of the crowd, asserting his authority by placing his hands on his hips and rocking on his heels like a prison warden.

  The show goes on.

  Barbie and Conrad perform “Sixteen Going on Seventeen.” Conrad turns out to be surprisingly good—he even sings with vibrato. But Barbie can’t carry a tune in a bucket. Her grasp of the melody is so tenuous she seems to be inventing her own microchromatic scale, singing notes that lie right between pitches. But what she lacks in musical ability she makes up for by looking winsome while tossing her hair.

  Gale searches for Sterling backstage, but the only light in the Drama Shack comes from the rising moon. She doesn’t see him until he runs onstage for “My Favorite Things.”

  The entrance of Kurt and Friedrich is supposed to be a laugh, the cue being, “Boys aren’t afraid of thunder and lightning.” But the fact that Sterling runs on wearing—to the untutored eye—a nightgown only arouses another round of sniggers and mutters from the audience. The sparkle in Sterling’s eyes has gone out, replaced with grim determination.

  As Gale sings about dogs biting and bees stinging, she flicks her glance toward the heckler in the front row, desperately trying to thought-balloon to Sterling that Oscar Hammerstein has a solution to his troubles: he just needs to think of his Favorite Things. But Sterling has fallen deep inside himself, his dream come true now a waking nightmare. Gale says a silent prayer of thanks to the Holy Nose that they didn’t have fabric to make playclothes out of floral pattern drapery or else they’d lose all control of the show. Still, the prey is wounded and is suffering a painful, lingering death.

  Sterling moves through “Do-Re-Mi” joylessly, robotically, his wings clipped. And he doesn’t sing his Kurt’s show-offy high note in “So Long, Farewell,” but gives a clipped “Good-bye” and runs off like he’s afraid someone will throw something at him.

  During intermission, the cast is united in their condemnation of the heckler. Amanda even rolls up her nun’s sleeves, promising to “beat the snot out of that kid.” But the talk quickly turns autobiographical: Did you see how I slipped during that number?/How did I sound?/Couldja tell I sang “Lonely Goat Turd”?

  Gale risks witnessing Aaron licking Barbie’s tonsils again by looking for Sterling on the back steps of the Drama Shack. Just above the blackened trees, the rising half-moon shimmers, the stars seeming to multiply by the second.

  “Can you believe the astronauts are almost all the way to the moon?” she says. “It’s like science fiction.”

  Sterling doesn’t look up. Gale sits down next to him. “That kid is a jerkoff Don’t pay attention to him.”

  Sterling turns to her, his eyes like mirrors. “EVERYONE paid attention to him. You know they did. I wish I’d never come here. I wish I wasn’t born.”

  Without thinking, Gale thrusts her arm on him, the way her mother does when she makes a sudden stop in the car. Since her mother’s a lousy driver, that happens a lot.

  “Don’t say that,” Gale says. “Don’t ever say that. If you weren’t born, how could I do The Sound of Music without you?”

  “I wish you had.”

  He rises and leaves, taking a piece of Gale’s heart with him.

  The show goes on.

  Gale’s love scene with Aaron feels nothing like she thought it would be. When he takes her face in his hands to kiss her, all she can think about is Barbie Bittman—not just Barbie herself but all the Barbies in the world, girls who have lives waiting for them on their doorsteps, instead of the Barbras, who have to beat the doors down.

  The audience goes “oooooh” when they kiss, and Gale just wants to scream. They’re so immature, they deserve The Haunting of the Sandwich. Particularly after how they treated poor Sterling.

  She thinks about Sterling as she sings “Something Good” and the lyrics about the wicked, miserable past suddenly come into high relief, as if she were carving them into her brain. He has no idea the good he’s done. Not just making the show better, but for Gale herself. For getting the cosmic joke. For getting her. For the first time in her life, she feels like someone understands her, instantly, intuitively. For the past two weeks, she’s come down to breakfast and been greeted by a boy who can cross his eyes and imitate Barbra Streisand saying, “Hello, gorgeous.” It’s sort of like love, but better. It’s being seen.

  And now half the camp just took a crap on him.

  While the Jewish Nuns Chorus makes a stately procession onstage to kill time, Barbie Bittman helps Gale into her wedding dress. G
ale wishes she didn’t, because it just makes her more self-conscious of how poorly she compares to the aptly named Barbie. Like the universe, Gale’s hips and thighs are continually expanding while her boobs don’t seem to get the message from below. But when Barbie steps back after she adjusts the veil on Gale’s head and whispers, “You look beautiful,” Gale knows exactly what to do.

  Stuffing a pillow under her dress, she makes Maria von Trapp a pregnant bride.

  Just as it does for Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl, the audience goes ape with laughter, particularly since the nuns are singing the reprise of “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?” It’s a true roar, a palpable quake that shakes the molecules in the air, a sonic boom. It rolls in waves onto the stage as Gale continues to work the bit, walking a few steps, then stopping and clutching her side as if she’s had a labor pain. She bends over, hyperventilating and crossing her eyes for maximum comic effect. Another thunder clap of laughter.

  Gale’s internal pinball machine dings and bings, flashing feelings ricocheting throughout her body. The laughter feels like approval, even love, but how can she enjoy it when it comes from those cruel mouths?

  She crosses to Aaron, who’s staring at the ground, trying to remain composed, but all she can see is Sterling quivering behind him. The child almost appears to be in pain as he clutches his sides, tears streaming down his cheeks as he barely suppresses an epileptic fit of laughter. An hour ago, they were dying onstage, now she’s killing them, slaughtering them.

  Then, like a volcano erupting, a geyser of blood red snot explodes out of Sterling’s nose. The audience lets out a horror-movie scream and for a split second it’s like the Zapruder footage of President Kennedy getting shot.