My Favorite Things

When I was small my family took most of our vacations in my grandmother's RV. Some of my absolute best memories are of those trips, the smell of the omnipresent shag carpeting, the cozy lighting, the way rain made rivers down the window as I lay in my bed, which had earlier that evening been the table where we ate supper. "The coach", as we called it, was equipped with an 8-track tape deck and I think we only had about 5 tapes: Debussy piano music, Vivaldi's 4 Seasons, Simon and Garfunkel, Judy Collins and The Sound of Music. I knew The Sound of Music by heart long before I ever saw the movie or performed it in Lise's backyard.
Tonight I was strongly considering staying home in front of the space heater instead of going to choir. At the last minute I rallied and was rewarded thusly: having given up all hope of doing something grandiose with the group, the director seemed to have scoured whatever old sheet music belonged to the college already and found an SSA arrangement of "My Favorite Things". This is a far cry from Bernstein you might say, as did I. But I put aside my snobbery and began to sing with all my heart. Its really esoteric wisdom, that Rodgers and Hammerstein! GIve your energy to what you love and you begin to love the whole world! Just to keep me from totally floating away on a cloud, the woman next to me kept singing "fay-vo-right". The director demonstrated several times how to sing the word (very much like it is usually pronounced, actually). "Fay-vo-right" she kept saying. "Favorite!" I said to her, the way I would if I were talking about peppermint stick ice cream. Crickets.