Thanksgiving & The Sound of Music

Thanksgiving has come and gone, followed by that silly Black Friday mania. Why would so many people feel so compelled to go out and fight the traffic and stand in line and fight the crowds and spend oodles of cash on stuff they may not even need, just to get those ridiculous discounts? “Tis a mystery. I’m glad I didn’t have to do it. We had a very nice Thanksgiving (or birthgiving, as one of my Facebook friends called it) dinner provided by our local Safeway grocery store—12 pound pre-cooked turkey, corn bread stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, cranberry sauce, dozen rolls, and a small pumpkin pie. Perfect for the three of us, my wife and I and daughter Jeri, and it would have easily fed six or seven. Best of all, the prep for it all was simple and the post-dinner cleanup a breeze. Thank you, Mrs. Safeway. We toyed with the idea of sticking a candle on the pie to commemorate my birthday but decided against it. After eating too much, I don’t think I’d have had enough energy to blow out even one candle, let alone eighty. Eighty might have set our house on fire. But now we’re on the eve of December with a short hop to Christmas and then to another new year. Tempus fugit.

There’s been a lot of hype recently about the upcoming NBC showing of a live Sound of Music, with Carrie Underwood playing Maria. Last Tuesday we went to the Arizona Broadway Theatre, our nearby dinner theatre, and saw Sound, and let me say that the girl who played Maria, Trisha Hart Disworth, would have made Julie Andrews proud. ABT just keeps getting better and better. The show opened with the seven nuns and the Mother Abbess behind a scrim screen, the abbey and castle and mountains on the scrim, a lighted abbey window behind them, four pillars and a high gated fence in front of them, and they sang the vespers a cappella. Enough to take my breath away. Then the fence and pillars exited left and right, the backdrop went up, the scrim went up, and Maria was there, lying on the stage with the mountains on a backdrop, and we hear the oh so familiar strains of the hills being alive. And what a voice Maria had. The sets and costumes and singing were wonderful. The voices of Maria and the Mother Abbess were fine enough for Broadway. I see that Audra MacDonald is playing the mother superior in the live production, and she has a great operatic voice, but I don’t think she’ll be any better than ABT’s Ariana Valdes. Anyone who might read this who lives in our Valley of the Sun should go see this ABT production. It was spectacular.