I’ve traveled, and written about travel, a lot this year for work, all while writing with Emily via Skype and text and email. She’s shown up—obliquely—in my travel writing, too.
Our mothers’ mother, Nana Fitz, used to call Nora and me the “Joy Girls.” The moniker appeared without explanation at the end of her life, around the time Nora and I entered our twenties. I relished it as a signifier of our allegiance, as a sign that we—unmarried and ambitious, avid travelers and social planners par excellence—could be joyful because we insisted on it as a right. In a certain light, Joy Girl could be a critique, connoting immaturity, selfishness, flippancy. But Nana said it with a hint of wonder, as if she couldn’t quite believe the kind of girls we were able to be, or the women we were becoming. She said it having been a Joy Girl once, too.
On-screen on the original Sound of Music tour, a group of nuns shake their heads in similar disbelief. “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” they ask as we drive away from the abbey, following the Salzach River out from the old city center. The young novice’s faults are many: torn clothes, tree climbing, singing in the abbey, tardiness, overenthusiasm for meals. “She’s a headache,” one nun complains. “She’s an angel,” another insists. The Mother Abbess, in a bit of musical theater wisdom that both lifts up and breaks my heart, equates them: “She’s a girl.”
Like nearly everyone else on the tour—the second full bus dispatched this rainy off-season morning—Nora and I have loved The Sound of Music since we were girls. Gorgeously shot on location (there’s a reason we’ve all come to Salzburg), set to unforgettable music (try getting it out of your head), both romantic and antifascist—what’s not to like? As adults we’ve loved doing Sound of Music things together: going to an outdoor sing-along and braiding our hair in a vaguely Alpine manner, seeing a stage revival when it came to our hometown and echoing the words under our breath. I love that Nora and I share this, but I love it even more because, in addition to its beauty, it speaks some sort of truth to me. Maria, when she spins in that Alpine meadow in the movie’s iconic opening—hungry, happy, heedless—is the ultimate Joy Girl.