A Few of My Favorite Things: Drag Queens, Nuns

"But you'll miss Drag Ball!" was invariably the first response I garnered when I told people I would be in London for the Spring semester. Our school's obsession with this most bizarre event is amazing. It's Oberlin's biggest party of the year, and one of the key elements is large amounts of cheap lace.

If Drag Ball is Lorain County's claim to fame, here in the heart of London, the West End, I have discovered something even more terrifying: Sing-Along-A-Sound of Music.

Sing-Along-A-Sound-of-Music is a phenomenon in London.

The entire movie version of The Sound of Music is screened, with the inclusion of subtitles during the musical numbers. The entire audience sings all of the gooey Rodgers and Hammerstein songs at the top of their lungs. And part of the joyous fun of the experience comes with shouting back at the characters on the screen.

This event takes place every Friday night and Sunday afternoon. The audience is large and comes from miles around. The Sunday I went, a large crowd had gathered early outside of the Prince Charles movie cinema.

Many in the crowd were costumed; mostly dressed as nuns, though I did see some men in Alpine leather shorts and suspenders. A couple Baron Von Trapps were in attendance.

One was even French kissing a Nazi. Next to the couple stood a man in a cardboard box and brown tights. Glued to the box was some rope. He was smoking a cigarette. I asked him what he was and he informed me, in a rather snippy manner-- "Well what do you think? A brown paper package tied up with string."

The audience was one of the most diverse I have ever come across. There were older people who undoubtedly saw "The Sound of Music" when it first ran in movie theaters, young children dressed as various Von Trapp children and plenty of gay men. On the camp-o-meter, Sing-Along-A-Sound-of-Music is definitely a 10.

The afternoon was hosted by a six-foot drag queen named Candy Von Floss. (Candy Floss is what the English call cotton candy.) She waltzed down the aisle in an enormous dress, stiletto heels and a Dame Edna-pink wig which was reminiscent of her name. The coup de theatre was that Candy's dress had a built-in curtain rod over her arms and shoulders. She was quick to point out, in her ever-so-husky voice, that her dress was in homage to the scene when Maria makes play clothes for the Von Trapp children out of old curtains.

Ms. Floss continued her pre-performance presentation with an overview of how we in the audience were to sing. She used as an example Do-Re-Mi. The spotlight centered on her and she gracefully demonstrated how we were to make little antlers on our heads for do, on re we needed to extend our hand like a tender ray of sun and on me we had to point to ourselves. Floss' rendition of the song continued until everyone in the audience demonstrated sufficient understanding. The set of Von Trapp children Floss had picked as volunteers (a group of six-year-old girls from the audience) looked exceedingly pleased with themselves. She reminded us all that we needed to over-enunciate all of the lyrics "just like Julie."

For an extra few pounds, one can buy a Sing Along-A-Sound-of-Music kit.

The kit includes a foam nun to wave in the air during all ecclesiastical scenes, some plastic Edelweiss to sweetly sway with while Christopher Plummer strums his guitar, fire crackers to explode during the party scene and a package of Ricola, so after three hours of Sing-Along-A-Sound-of-Music you could not only climb every mountain but still have a voice to sing about it.

The sense of community that the sing-along inspires is its strongest feature.

The Oscar-winning movie is a very long one, but it is a rather poor musical. "Schnitzel with noodles?" "Crisp apple strudel?" Does anyone care? In fact, in the canon of American musicals, I would place The Sound of Music right at the bottom. As a piece of camp fun and family fun though, the story cannot be beat.

In addition to roaring out the songs in unison and booing at the Nazis, the audience makes continual comments and wisecracks. Whether these are smart or silly, by the time the third reel roles almost anything anyone says sends the audience into hysterics. I have only ever felt such community at the very best live theater events.

I don't want to get too intellectual on the eve of Drag Ball, but I believe that Robert Brustein, the artistic director of the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts has hit upon the reason why Sing-Along-A-Sound-of-Music works so brilliantly.

He writes in his essay "Acting in England and America" that, "encounter groups, sensitivity sessions, feelies, and the whole desperate paraphernalia of contact are invented in the hope that physical proximity or public confession will somehow create links with strangers, while people divide along racial, sexual, and generational lines in a frantic search for brotherhood and community."

Sing-Along-A-Sound-of-Music is all of the above, and it blurs the lines. In jeering and booing, the audience creates a community-even if that community is made up of suburbanites, worshippers of sugary historical drama, cult movie devotees and six-foot-tall drag queens. Not to mention all the little Von Trapps. And the nuns eating popcorn in the fourth row.

Still looking for a costume to wear to Drag Ball? Might I suggest Julie Andrews? Or maybe a nice pair of warm woolen mittens...