Like so many of us, I have loved the movie The Wizard of Oz since I was a child. It has been a source of entertainment and inspiration; it’s an example of the courage, heart, brains, and commitment required to face our deepest fears, remember our inner strength, and claim a life beyond what we believed possible. A journey on which, as Glinda the Good Witch instructed (pointing her magic wand toward the first steps along the Yellow Brick Road), it is always best to start at the beginning.
Long before the days of on-demand entertainment or even clunky VHS machines, we children would anxiously await the annual television broadcast of this classic film. Bathed and in our pajamas, we were ready to settle in for Dorothy’s magical adventure, our voices warmed up and ready to sing along with the iconic score, and our pillows on standby to cover our faces during the scary parts. It was truly an event. And if you were lucky, you were one of the households with a color TV, making Dorothy’s arrival in Munchkinland a glorious Technicolor transformation.
I admit I was a total geek when it came to buying into the full-spectrum experience of Dorothy’s adventures in Oz: getting goose bumps with each song, every cell in my body chilled to the core in terror at the arrival of the Wicked Witch of the West. I never failed to generate tears of joy (mixed with an undertow of disappointment) at the end, when, having returned to her Kansas farm, Dorothy exclaims, “Oh, Auntie Em, there’s no place like home,” cueing the swelling of the music and the rolling of the final credits.
Always one to believe in the magic of possibility, for years, I was in total denial that Dorothy’s journey through Oz was a concussion-induced dream. Each year, I would watch as Dorothy took her magical adventure, hoping deep down she might take a different fork in the road and make a different choice when it came time to click her ruby slippers three times and head on home. Any disappointment on my part with Dorothy’s return to Kansas was in protest to her having surrendered her Technicolor dream world in order to return to the reality of her black-and-white world of the Midwest. In my child’s logic, I equated this “reality” to be a cop-out, void of imagination, lifeless, and without passion. Much like, as it would be made clear to me later on, how I related to the prospect of adulthood and growing up: a surrender to the loss of innocence and the dismissal of the magic of life. “Please, just drop a house on me now.”
