My Favorite Things

In college I discovered that I love writing parodies of songs, particularly ones from musicals.  Also, the cheesier, the better (for a truly awesome example, please ask me about a certain tall person from my university and a song from the musical Wicked).  But really, it all began many, many years ago, with a project for my 8th grade health class called the Me Book.  It was one of those generic self-awareness-increasing, personal-history-recording sort of things.  I remember this project in particular for two reasons. One, I got to use cute paper and quasi-scrapbook my life (pretty much always a plus in homework assignments, to both my delight as well as my mother's).  Two, I finished it while on vacation with my family for Memorial Day Weekend, at an annual baseball tournament that my brother's team was playing in.  My teacher, Mr. Alvarez, has a son my brother's age who was on the same team that year (and many years to come, actually), and I can distinctly remember setting up scrapbook shop on a picnic blanket some distance from the baseball field and watching Mr. Alvarez while he lounged in a lawn chair, watching baseball without a care in the world.  I thought the whole thing was very unfair.  Actually, I still do.  That was 10 years ago.  Apparently I have a hard time letting go.  But back to the whole point of this long-winded story:  the Me Book required a variety of entries and themed pages, one of them having to do with things we liked.  I decided to write a parody of the song "My Favorite Things" (courtesy of Rodgers and Hammersteins' The Sound of Music).  It was pretty epic, especially for an 8th grader.

Fast-forward 10 years.  My trip to Germany this summer found me next door, visiting Salzburg, Austria, where much of the story of The Sound of Music takes place.  No thanks to our hostel and the millions of souvenir shops in that small town, various musical snippets from that show have been stuck in my head for the past two months.  When my birthday rolled around a few weeks ago and my friend Kerry bravely volunteered her sister and brother-in-law to host my party, she asked what the theme should be, and I replied without really thinking about it, "My Favorite Things!"  We ended up celebrating three early September birthdays that evening, so I forewent the theme, glad to share the occasion with friends quickly becoming my Spokane family, but my idea for a invitation with wording that fit into that of "My Favorite Things" is still bouncing around my brain.  Pair that with an attempted discipline of gratitude, and my new idea is to write a parody of "My Favorite Things" using things I am grateful for in this season.  Here's my attempt- please sing along.  No mocking though, because I'm a little out of practice, and this isn't a joke, it's my prayer of thankfulness.  Here it goes....

(boom-chuck-chuck, boom-chuck-chuck,
boom-chuck-chuck, boom-chuck-chuck)

Teardrops on Sundays, and sweet puppy faces,
Bright, shiny books, and bookmarks to keep places,
Birthday gifts, postcards, even bills and dumb things,
These are a few of my favorite things.


(boom-chuck-chuck, boom-chuck-chuck,
boom-chuck-chuck, boom-chuck-chuck)

Brand-new grandbabies, with sweet crocheted hats on,

Nights out with friends and nights in with movies on,

Sitting on my porch watching the sunset,

thinking to myself how I am so blessed.

(boom-chuck-chuck, boom-chuck-chuck,

boom-chuck-chuck, boom-chuck-chuck)

People with soccer balls, laughing and running,

even the sweat from our nose to our stockings,

Long-lasting summers that stretch into fall,

These are the things that I like best of all.

When the night comes, when my heart hurts,

when I'm feeling sad,

I simply am thankful for all of things,

and then I don't feel.......so baaaaa----------------------d!