The Hills Are Alive

Ok, one final word on this Sunday’s Oscars and then we can move on…

I didn’t see a single, solitary movie in the whole line-up.  LIE!  Ok, I did see that one with Reese Witherspoon on the hiking trail.  Well, and also that one with all the fairytale singing that went on so long I fell asleep right about the time all the giant-laying-waste-to-the-village stuff happened.  But other than that?  Nada.  And if that makes me an L to the O to the S-E-R, then what does that make Hubby?  ‘Cause he didn’t see the Reese one, only the fairytale singing one.  Hi, Honey!  Sorry about that cold I gave you.  But in all fairness, you did give it to me first.

But where I’m really going with all of this is that JULIE ANDREWS WAS THERE!

And?  LADY GAGA REPRISED ALL OF MY FAVORITE SONGS FROM “SOUND OF MUSIC”!!!!

Why all caps?  BECAUSE I LOVELOVELOVE “SOUND OF MUSIC” AND JULIE ANDREWS!!!!!

If I could, I would skin Julie Andrews and wear her as a little hoodie.  But in a good, I completely LOVE her and really just want to BE her sort of way.  Not in a creepy, it puts the lotion in the basket or else it gets the hose again sort of way.  The only thing I might consider changing about my hoodie would be the hair length.  I always wanted Julie to have slightly longer hair so that when I wear the hoodie it detracts from the double chin.  Hers, not mine.

So it goes without saying that since I LOVE Julie Andrews and since I LOVE the “Sound of Music,” the last time I was in Salzburg, Austria, I spent one whole day taking the “Sound of Music” tour.  And yes, it’s a thing.  It’s an actual thing all the cool people in the world pay money to do.  Cough, cough, nerd, your own self. 

You get to ride in a van and see the alpine meadow where Julie starts off the movie with her famous twirl.  You get to see the church where Maria and Captain my Captain get married.  (The fun fact here would be that while they actually got married at Nonnberg Abbey where the real Maria was a nun-in-training, the marriage scene for the movie however – where Julie’s long, long veil trails down the aisle behind her – was actually filmed at Collegiate Church.)  You see the Festival Hall where the Von Trapps sang the night of their escape.  At tour’s end, you even get to see the Untersberg Mountain that the family had to walk over after Austria’s borders closed.

Finally, because it’s dark and you spent all your money on the tour, you get to walk two miles up a weird, wooded hill to your bed and breakfast with its smelly, shared bathroom.  At which point you realize the hills around Salzburg are alive with the sound of…Nazi foot soldiers running right ATCHA through the forest!!!  GAAAH!!  Oh, ho ho.  Of course not.  Don’t be silly.  That’s actually the sound of HEDGEHOGS.  They’re nocturnal.  Who knew?  And they make a heartstopping amount of foot soldier noise (if you’ve got Nazis on the brain) as they snuffle through the underbrush.  My advice is to always, always buy the Sound of Music flashlight souvenir so you can see what the hills are alive with – at night – in the woods near Salzburg.

So…….

That’s it about the Oscar Awards.  That’s the final word.  To your mother.  We are now free to move on.