Like most people, I spent the last few hours of Easter Sunday flipping back and forth between an episode of Run's House on MTV2 and the Family Channel's presentation of one of my Top 10 favorite movies of all time, The Sound of Music. I figured it was an Eastery lineup because Reverend Run, after all, is a man of the cloth, and The Sound of Music is all about morals and family bonding.
I'm always enthralled by the scene in which Liesel sneaks out to meet young Rolf for a midnight rendezvous on the grounds of the Von Trapp family estate. Rolf, though clearly a controlling a-hole in the making, is unbelievably dashing as he twirls Liesel around the conservatory, where she leaps like a unicorn from bench to bench in her pink chiffon dress. I can't say the lyrics of their little serenade hit home for me—particularly when Liesel sings, "I need someone older and wiser telling me what to do" (um, no thanks)—but if they would just dub in a nice Oasis remake from The O.C. soundtrack and put Rolf in a linen suit instead of that Nazi uniform, the encounter would play out to near perfection.
It was that scene featuring the ocean-eyed Liesel that led directly to my ill-advised quest for non-prescription color contact lenses during the summer before my sophomore year of college. My sister Claire and I spent a blazing hot afternoon driving from Lens Crafters to Lens Crafters in my un-air-conditioned sauna of a car (Black Beauty #1), desperately seeking an ophthalmologist cool enough to sell us blue contacts on the spot so we could wear them to a raging keg party at my apartment later that night.
We finally finagled a few pairs at a price we could ill afford ($60), and we giddily made our way home to see how great we would look. After about 45 minutes of wide blinking and painful eye watering, we concluded that we did indeed look fantastic. We completed the effect with just a few pounds of eyeliner and mascara. (In retrospect, I'm not sure one could draw a direct comparison between us and Liesel...Marilyn Manson, now that I can see.)
There were a few hours of carefree blue-eyed fun, made all the merrier by the fact that we were taking shots of wine from a cardboard box throughout the evening. But in the end, the experiment failed because A. I couldn't see shit and B. I find it impossible to touch my own eyeball. The prized baby blues dried up in their case and that, darlings, was the end of that.
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