100 things #3: Liesl von Trapp

[lirazel]

I'm Liesl. I'm sixteen years old, and I don't need a governess.

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The Sound of Music is one of those movies that I've watched so many times, from such a young age, that I am completely incapable of judging whether it is a good movie or not. It may be sublime. It may be terrible. I don't know. All I know is, that for as long as I can remember, it's been there. My sister and I were raised on a steady diet of the movies that my mama had grown up watching, so that meant lots of black-and-white, lots of musicals. When people tell me that they don't like musicals, my brain just shuts down because it refuses to understand. Musicals are the best. And The Sound of Music is like the most musical of all musicals.

We watched that movie so many times on those double-VHSes (you had to change the video after the big party where the kids sang "So Long, Farewell" and the music swelled as Maria left the Von Trapps' to go back to the abbey) that, yes, I can quote the entire movie, word-for-word.

Obviously when you start watching at that young of an age (I literally don't remember a time before I had seen that movie), you don't really relate to Maria. I mean, I appreciate her now, but at the time, I liked the kids best. Brigitta was my favorite and the one I most related to because she walked around reading books and was also a smart-aleck (I got in trouble quite a bit for talking back to my parents, and I'm notorious in my family for wanting to have the last word), and I admit to having a bit of a crush on Friedrich when I got older (and by "older," I mean, like, twelve), but I wanted to be Liesl.

Mostly I think it was the pretty floaty dress and the dancing. I have always been a sucker for a pretty floaty dress. And since I grew up in a community where dancing has been frowned upon until my generation (I went to a wedding with dancing for the first time when I was 21, and I have been to a lot of weddings in my time. We also had a lot of jokes growing up about dancing--things like "Dancing leads to babies" and "We might as well--we can't dance" and my personal favorite--"[Denomination] doesn't like pre-marital sex because they're scared it might lead to dancing." It honestly wasn't as ridiculously conservative as I'm making it sound, it was just that it had been, and there was a kind of cultural holdover that meant that dancing just wasn't part of my cultural landscape except in movies), I was always really fascinated by it. I still can't dance, since I've never learned and I'm super self-conscious and also hella klutzy. But I've always loved it in theory. The entirety of my dancing experience growing up was dancing around the living room while musicals or figure skating were playing in the background (lil sis did this, too, often in footy pajamas, which once led to her falling on our wooden floor and busting her chin so that it swelled up so big that my parents made Jay Leno jokes). Now I dance around my living room with my iPod on, and I am just as hopelessly no-at-all-graceful as ever.


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And if I've seen the movie itself hundreds of times, I've seen the "Sixten Going on Seventeen" sequence thousands. SO DELIGHTFUL--if you ignore the words of the song, which are ridiculous. Gah, Rolfe, you're such a jerk.

All of that to say: when I was a little girl, sixteen seemed impossibly old and mature. That was when things started happening to you, like falling in love and such. And wearing floaty dresses and dancing in gazebos. I didn't think very deeply about the movie or anything other than the joy it made me feel. But I think Liesl had a lesson to teach me that I probably didn't take the time to learn. If I had paid more attention, I probably would have realized that growing up isn't always all that awesome. I always wanted to be thought of as grown up and mature. And I couldn't wait to reach the age when things finally start happening to you (note to bitty!Lauren: I still haven't reached that age). But honestly, no matter how lovely it might seem to dance around in a storm in a glass gazebo in a beautiful dress, Liesl's little growing-up character arc is pretty bittersweet. Because the guy she dances around with turns out to be a Nazi and she gets her heartbroken and she has to leave her outrageously beautiful house and walk over the mountains, which, though they're gorgeous, cannot be fun to hike if you're doing it to save your life.

Her story is a lot more mature than I ever really noticed as a little girl, a lot more realistic, and there are so many more dark undercurrents to the entire film than I realized. Bitty!Lauren probably should have listened to Maria when she sang for Liesl to "wait a year or two" to be such a grownup and fall in love. I probably should have realized that being a grownup doesn't mean that life is going to be a glorious musical romance. I didn't. But that's okay. I got so much joy out of pretending to be Liesl and coveting her dress and dancing skills and wanting to be a grownup. And now I am one, and it's not at all glamorous, but I still covet Liesl's dress and dancing skills, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.