In my child’s mind and heart, I wanted Dorothy to stay with her friends in the magnificent and colorful merry old land of Oz. Year after year, when the movie ended and I was tucked into bed for the night, I would spend what seemed like hours recommitting to the promise I had made with myself that if being an adult meant I had to surrender my over-the-rainbow childlike wonder, I wanted nothing to do with it. Adulting, as I witnessed it in the grown-ups around me, was a lot of hard work and not a lot of fun. Dorothy was stuck in her celluloid loop and destined to make the same choice for eternity. If she couldn’t rewrite her story, perhaps I could rewrite it for both of us by holding on to my childhood.
My metaphoric ruby heels dug in deep; I vowed to make it through the terrible teens with my inner child intact and unscathed. However, a parade of life happenings would derail my covenant, and I began to lose my way in the onslaught of complications, which are the normal and often traumatizing antithesis that comprise the course of adolescence. During my teen years, The Wizard of Oz was one of the fantasy worlds I visited to escape and block out the things that were too tough to bear, numbing myself in order to navigate my life without losing my mind. The other kids my age (and younger) were smoking, drinking, acting out sexual curiosity, and experimenting with drugs. Oz was my crack. It wasn’t until I was in my later teens, when my inner Dorothy, looking more and more like Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, that I sucked it up, got “real,” and abandoned any hope of my more desired alternate ending to Dorothy’s adventure.
Resigned to life as it was actually playing out (“But you are in a wheelchair, Blanche!”), I surrendered myself to the realization that I had been pining for a “fantasy” life, which I could not even reach, let alone latch onto with a sustainable grasp. I was living in a constant state of disappointment and anxiety, not being able to manifest the Technicolor life I had imagined for myself all those years ago. As much as I wanted to believe it, I struggled with the idea that “If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard. Because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with.” Instead, I found myself haunted by the Wicked Witch of the West’s command to “Surrender, Dorothy” and the possibility that, in my case, if it isn’t already there, I never really had it to begin with … and never would. It would take several more years, a series of intense heartbreaking experiences, and a lot of self-exploration before I stopped relating to Dorothy’s backyard in Kansas (and my personal field of dreams) as parched plots of dried-up potential.
In my mid-twenties, I began reframing my Oz issues and what would become the rewiring of my subconscious program- ming. One day, while between theatre job contracts, I found myself sitting in the dustbowl of my disappointments, buried in a stack of half-read self-help books. Feeling defeated, hopeless, and really sorry for myself, I settled into the couch, picked up the remote control, turned on the television, and slid down the rabbit hole of mind-numbing channel surfing for some mindless distraction. Twenty or so clicks in, I came upon my old favorite movie during the scene where Dorothy meets the Scarecrow. (Have you ever noticed how, during the If I Only Had a Brain song, Dorothy’s pigtails change length several times? I would one day use that as a sight gag for the Judy Garland character in a murder comedy spoof I directed. Funny thing about inspiration: it happens when and where it happens. But, back to the couch.) So, I settled in to watch The Wizard of Oz for the umpteenth time. My spirit lay broken and bloodied, having hit the rock bottom of limbo somewhere between my deflated childhood and a flatlining adulthood. I made it to the final scene in Oz when Glinda informs Dorothy she has always had the power to go home—all she had to do was click her heels three times, and she would be back in Kansas in an instant—and I (((snapped))). For some reason, distinct from any earlier viewing of the film, I had a visceral reaction to Glinda’s reveal. My resigned, bitter, and jaded self screamed out, “What?! Are you kidding me?!” Dorothy should have backhanded that glitter bitch and shoved that wand up her … (((breathe))). I couldn’t understand why Dorothy didn’t launch into a monological rage of, “What the hell do you mean tell- ing me this (((now)))?! You maybe could have made mention of this back in Munchkinland before I walked all this way in these ruby, blister-inducing slippers, stalked by that emerald-skinned douche bag, terrorized by freaky-assed flying fleabags, and all but soiling myself before that shit show of a ‘Wonderful’ Wizard of Oz moron? WTF is wrong with you, lady?!” (Imagine my surprise when, a few years later, Mad TV did a Wizard of Oz alternate ending sketch, which almost word-for-word mirrored my rant.)
