David Mitchell
Jim,
What weird name for a dance - named for tarantula (spiders), or rather, the disease received from a tarantula bite.
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Back to Austrian Slap Dancing for a moment, here is a brief tour of the central "old city" of Salzburg, Austria, home of Mozart and the huge annual world wide Mozart Music Festival (and my home for the summer of '65). Just about every prominent building, statue, and fountain is lit up for the entire month. You might recognize a bit of this from the movie. The Castle in the background is Schoss HohenSalzburg, built in about 1,100. Salzburg ("Salt town" or "Salt city") was a strategic Roman stronghold for it's salt mines, which are all around Salzburg.
The second photo is taken looking across Mirabel Gardens up at the distant Castle. You might recall a scene where Maria and the Von Trap children danced up and down those steps. I walked through that park often.
The third photo is a bunch of my classmates walking up to the overlook at the old Cafe Winkler, a scenic outdoor restaraunt that has been torn down in place of an art museum. I seem to recall a scene from the movie up there too. The man in the white shirt and dark hat was OSU German language professor Harold Lentz, who, along with his wife, organized and lead our trip.
(I think we were about 60 college kids and 40 high school kids. We lived with locals - my 4 "roomies" (2 college - 2 High school) had an almost invisible widow apartment owner, so we didn't get any "family connection". She put out breakfast rolls and jam and coffee and tea in the morning, and would then disappear for the rest of the day. My roomie, a kid one year older from Mansfield Senior High turned out to be one of the neatest parts of my summer. We had a ball together.)
(I had just learned from my uncle how to use a real camera - my dad's old 35mm 1953 Kodak Retina II-a. A couple of us had fun using our cameras at night, guessing at varoius timed exposures of those lighted buildings - using a tri-pod and a shutter release cord. They came out pretty good.)
Note: that last shot if one of the worlds least known "slap dancers" in his "lederhosen".

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