for Max Detweiler to pluck it out of obscurity and make it famous at the Salzburg Folk Festival.”
(This, Critical Reader, is one of the criminal bits of logic that corrupts mankind’s expectations. How simply Max throws around the idea of bestowing Fame upon those who charm him. How easily these drab, voiceless children will leapfrog into being prodigy songbirds, capable of bursting into spontaneous, complex, Mills Brothers-style harmonies. The children are passively led into instant celebrity. This is the necrotic root of the prevailing dead-end dream: If only the right mentors will produce me, direct me, refine me, and discover me! Many a starry-eyed girl or boy would climb into the back of a mysterious big black car for the promise of adequate pop “coaching,” because such wishful egoporn has always been tossed into screenplays without caution.)
Roland sang, like sweet coffee:
Your life little girl Is an empty page That men will want to write on….
Women swooned, men admired him.
I’m GLAD to GO-O-O, I cannot tell a LIE-I…
… bellowed Liza in her power-voice during her one big solo moment, as audience members wondered why she was wearing high Lucite heels with her nautical infant dress.
I flit, I float I flick-I-flee-I fly-?…
… purred Desiree Baumgarten, adding a ballet stag-leap to her pretty exit as Liza clomped offstage.
“You were blushing in his arms tonight,” remarked the Baroness, after Maria and Von Trapp are caught doing an Austrian folk dance.
(Hisss, went the audience.)
“I was?!” screamed Peppy, grabbing her cheeks.
(Cackles.)
“Goodbye Maria,” sneered Baroness Barbette, “I’m sure you’ll make a very… fine nun.”
(Howls of mirth.)
Maria’s return to the abbey was the cue for Neville’s big scene as Mother Abbess, during which he sang “Climb Every Mountain” in an unctuous pseudo-operatic falsetto. Audience members found themselves checking the program:
Neville Vanderleeg (Mother Abbess, Herr Zeller, Franz the Butler) is the last of the living castrati tenors, his testicles having been removed in the service of the Royal Latvian Boys’ Choir at the age of nine. His precious instrument has since been destroyed by cigarettes.
After marching down the aisle to “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria (Reprise),” Peppy ascended to the altar (a podium draped in gold lamé) and tore her wedding dress down to a white micromini. Gasps were audible. As she began to juggle four sizable wooden crucifixes, the audience sat in goggle-eyed shock. Several parents pondered lawsuits, others considered storming the backstage and rescuing their teens from Act II.
Brigham Hamburger stood and exited, nostrils flaring in outrage.
Peppy threw a wild cross, tripped over her dropped skirt, and sprawled onto her stomach, inadvertently exposing the hygienic cotton crotch of her nylons to the aghast spectators as crucifixes bounced and smacked to the floor.
Ned and Ike wisely plunged the room into total blackout.
~INTERMISSION~
(“This is the best thing Neville’s ever done! It just pees all over everything sacred!”)
(“Should I go backstage and get Tiffany?”)
(“Can you believe that all they have is generic beer?”)
Somehow, the parents were too intimidated by the magical “Fourth Wall” to disrupt the proceedings, and the rest of the show came off without incident. Perhaps, for the actors, it was muscle memory that brought it off. More likely, it was the well-known story itself that insisted on being told, as it was lodged midsneeze in everyone’s mind at that point.
Lalo, who had been fortifying himself throughout the night with a bottle of Bacardi 151, had worked up a lather of self-pity. It was with raw feeling that he delivered the Dramatic Pivot Point, when Georg Von Trapp is “requested,” via telegram, to join the Nazi Navy: “To refuse them would be fatal for all of us. And joining them would be unthinkable,” goes the line.
“Refuse these is to be fate for uz… to join the… unzirgismol,” Lalo moaned, dropping the telegram to the floor, plashing large tears to the stage as Peppy vigorously stroked his chest to comfort him.
He was in such an ecstasy of grief by the time the Von Trapps performed at the Salzburg Folk Festival that before singing “Edelweiss,” Lalo struck a few aggressive gypsy chords and emitted a wild flamenco cry like a murderous orgasm. Several of the mothers in the audience felt a dizzying larceny in their hearts as they crossed their legs. A few imagined a mirrored-ceiling’s eye-view of their fingernails plunging into Lalo’s naked buttocks. Several of the men liked it too.
The show ended, and the audience clapped, breaking up the dream-time and returning all participants to Fairfax, CA.
As Chantal and Roland held hands and advanced downstage for their curtain call, the applause explosively quadrupled in volume. The whistles and whooooh shot like poisoned blow darts through Liza, making her wonder: Why can’t I stand here in a prom dress, covered with blood, and burn this place down with my mind?
Her throat filled with the Drano-sensation of repressed sobbing. As she watched Chantal Baumgarten casually hijack every life dream she possessed, Liza got the overwhelming impression that the Gods that ran this Popsicle stand of a fucked-up universe just might be trying to tell her something. A message.
And that message was: “Ha ha ha ha ha. Psych.”
The parents collected their children quickly afterward, not wanting to let them steep in the weird, electric aftermath of such a depraved opening night—everyone was light-drunk and giddy with the ancient powers of stage energy. A few of the kids, bewildered by the audience response, felt like they were in trouble for something they didn’t understand; others felt a vague, blurry sense of having been morally tarnished by their affiliation with something they now understood to be somewhat raunchy. Kids are naturally prudish, and a few of them cried that night. Their mothers would have long discussions with them the next morning about how “The Show Must Go On,” all the while having whispered phone conversations with other mothers discussing what, if anything, should be done.
The Baumgartens gave Roland a ride to the bus station in their black Mercedes. Liza watched, waving goodbye as they drove away, their laughing, beautiful heads elegantly framed by the chrome windows of the shiny black diplomat car, the luxury of which seemed to transport Roland to another, better world as surely as a spaceship.
As the taillights glided away, Liza caught her own reflection in the window of a parked Dodge Omni. Under the streetlights, she realized she looked ridiculously trashy; in her quest to look more glamorous, she had inadvertently made herself into a kind of underage sex clown. She shuddered with self-loathing.
Peppy and Neville were extremely hopeful. They went out drinking with Neville’s friends after the show while Ned, Ike, and Noreen cleaned the theatre and replaced all the props.
The next day’s afternoon paper yielded their
