“Because there are at least two absolutely gorgeous songs from the stage version that got dropped when they put the movie together, and I plan to right that wrong — at least with regards to one of them.”
Carla respected the point that her principal made, but she didn’t respect it enough not to choose a song from the stage version that very few members of her audience would know. It was called “No Way to Stop it.” It was sung mostly by Captain Von Trapp’s socialite girlfriend, Baroness Schräder, and the captain’s impresario friend, Max Dettweiler. Through the song the Baroness and Max try to convince the captain to show his support for the oncoming annexation of Austria into the Third Reich, because it would make things easier for him. The gist of the song is this: there are things that happen in this world that can’t be stopped, and it is easier to simply accept this fact than waste time fighting the inevitable. It was a philosophy that Carla didn’t necessarily comport with, but she liked the catchy tune. It made her smile. In 1948, the city of Pocatello had passed a law making it illegal not to smile. Including the song in the program, she circuitously reasoned, would help make her audience more law-abiding.
Carla’s brother Wade, the chemistry professor, didn’t necessarily dislike the tune when his sister played the song for him, but he took strong issue with its message.
“The sentiment’s pretty loathsome,” he stated without qualification over dinner that night.
“Still, I think it would be perfect for Mrs. Roesler’s class. They’re the mischief-makers among the sixth graders, just like Max and Baroness Schräder in the movie.”
“So what are you saying to those students, Carla? Accept everything that comes to you as ineluctable? Don’t bother trying to make any kind of difference in this world?”
“You’re overanalyzing, Wade. Should I stop Mrs. Beamer’s students from singing ‘Sixteen Going on Seventeen’ because not a single one of them is over the age of twelve?”
“I’m curious: are you putting ‘No Way to Stop It’ before or after ‘Climb Every Mountain’?”
“First of all, it isn’t ‘Climb Every Mountain.’ It’s ‘Climb Ev’ry—Ev’ry Mountain.’ Two syllables to fit the meter. Secondly, I haven’t come up with an order for the songs yet, and does it really matter?”
“I’ll say it matters. ‘No Way to Stop It’ is a cynical piece-of-shit song, so you’ll need something like ‘Climb Ev’ry Mountain’ afterwards to get the bad taste out of everybody’s mouths. See, the first song says, ‘Some things, like the Nazi plan for world domination, as evil as it was, are simply too big to fight.’ On the other hand, the old nun tells us in the other song to never stop climbing mountains and fording streams in the pursuit of our dreams.”
“Hitler had a dream too. It was pretty awful. So what’s your point?”
“My point is to put the fucking inspirational song after the fucking accommodationist song. Hell, Sis, I don’t know why you’ve got some of the kids singing ‘No Way to Stop it,’ anyway. There aren’t already ten good songs you could use?”
Carla shook her head. “Just nine. And there might just be eight if half of Mrs. Drexel’s class continues to refuse to do ‘Lonely Goatherd.’ She says the boys won’t sing it because she’s asking them all to pretend to be marionettes. The boys say they would rather eat fried monkey testicles than have to dance around on stage like they’ve got strings attached to their arms and legs.”
“The teacher gave them that choice?”
“You think this is funny, but it’s just making me depressed. We start rehearsals next week and Mr. Greene is sure he’s going to get calls from some of the parents of Mrs. Roesler’s students.”
It was worse than that. Several of the parents gathered together in Mr. Greene’s office on parent-teacher night a couple of weeks later to voice their objections in person. Mrs. Roesler, the teacher of the sixth-grade class whose children had drawn the short straw while other fifth and sixth graders were, for example, analyzing the problem that is Maria and listing all of their favorite things, was there as well. Even though Mrs. Roesler had only a single working eye, one got the uncomfortable feeling that the other eye — opaque and stationary though it might be — was still honing in and making critical judgments.
Mrs. Roesler had strenuously opposed putting her pupils (and their parents) through this indignity, but there was not much else she could do. All of the songs had now been assigned. None of the other teachers would trade with her, and Mr. Lipe, one of the fifth-grade teachers, noted with glee the irony of Mrs. Roesler protesting the inexorable imposition upon her students of a song that was about not protesting inexorable impositions.
“I don’t like it one bit!” howled Mr. Hambert, the father of Melissa Hambert, a straight-A student who chewed her hair. “Why has my daughter’s class been singled out in this way?”
“It was simply the luck of the draw,” said the beleaguered principal, who had come to parent-teacher night looking forward to showing off the new gym, which was very nearly finished except for the fact that its ceiling had yet to be sprayed with protective asbestos foam.
“There’s the woman you ought to be talking to!” volunteered another one of the distraught parents. She was pointing at Carla, her finger jabbing the air as if she were implicating a suspected witch in colonial Salem.
“Are you the one?” asked another woman, who spoke in a softer voice, but who seemed no less concerned. “Was it you who saddled my daughter’s class with this awful Nazi song?”
Before Carla could answer, a man spoke up. He wore a grease-stained auto mechanic’s jumpsuit and must have come straight from work. “Do you believe our children to be selfish and whatchacallit — self-centered?”
Carla shook her head.
“Because that’s what the song’s telling these kids,” the man went on. “Don’t look out for nobody but yourself. That isn’t what our kids are getting at home, and it isn’t what they’re getting in their Sunday school classes, and if you ask me, it smacks of communism.”
“What it smacks of,” said Mr. Hambert, “is submission and subordination. You’re teaching our children to go beyond simply respecting authority and obeying their elders. You want them all to grow up to be brain-dead automatons without the necessary tools for critical thinking. I’m not one of these conspiracy-minded people, Miss Willard, but I don’t think this is the way we ought to be raising our children.”
The other parents in the room concurred with nods and under-voiced statements of strong agreement.
“That isn’t why I picked it,” said Carla, exasperation creeping into her delivery. “I just happen to like the tune. It’s bright and breezy.”
No one bothered to deliver a retort. Carla now knew where things stood. It had become quite evident to her (a teacher whose own pupils were having a grand time meeting the difficult polyphonic challenge of singing “Maria” against the vocalise counter-melody of the “Wedding Procession”) that she had failed both herself and everyone else in not paying more attention to what the song was saying. There was a reason, which she now understood, why the song hadn’t made it into the movie. It is true that negative sentiments have just as much right to be put to music as positive ones, but a lyricist often runs the risk of having his words taken out of character and situational context, especially when they are sung on the radio, or, let us say, on a cafetorium stage in a Pocatello, Idaho, elementary school.
“So what shall we do?” asked Principal Greene. This was Greene’s customary modus operandi in meetings such as these: stating the problem and then entertaining various solutions before coming to a consensus. “Do we leave Mrs. Roesler’s class out of the Evening of Song this year?”