OZ & OC

 Are there any baby boomers for whom The Wizard of Oz wasn't a part of Easter? The newly extended daylight hours of that Sunday night, the new jammies and the day's last doling of Easter basket contents all waited for that opening moment when Dorothy reaches for Toto... 

"She isn't coming yet, Toto. Did she hurt you? She tried to, didn't she? Come on - we'll go tell Uncle Henry and Auntie Em..."
       
I can still bring up the anticipation from the depths of childhood memory. 

And what of that wrenching moment when Miss Gulch takes Toto!? Or when the Wicked Witch leaves Dorothy with time running out!? Good Lord, could Margaret Hamilton be wicked or what?! 

I'm craving a chocolate bunny right now.

But the OZ has always been more for me. It's found me - on more than one occasion - approaching a wicked road. There's a chance it lead me there. Odds are greater the OZ has repeatedly saved me from sauntering down it.

During a pre-AC St. Louis summer - a time in my early grade school life that can only be termed tumultuous - I had trouble sleeping. I self-soothed the hot summer nights away by quietly singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow - over and over...and over. If memory serves me, I usually nodded off by the fifth or sixth time.

The brilliant remedy of a young insomniac or the road to obsessive compulsive? Let's skip through the poppies with option one.

Only a few summers later, I decided to read Frank L. Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz - alone, aloud and with perfection. Any mishap meant starting over at page one. 

It was on the second afternoon after having started over countless times and never making it past the first chapter that it occurred to me...maybe this isn't normal. I finished the book in the usual fashion of fourth graders.

Was I inching towards the twister that is obsessive compulsive? Let's fly like monkeys with a notable...perhaps. Yes speaks of too much surety...and perfection. 

When The Great and Powerful Oz opened in my part of the world on March 1st I was giddy with that old anticipation. I HAD to see it on opening day. Yet, March has found me so seriously steeped in a such myriad of activities that a theater outing should have immediately been seen as impossible.

But I had to see it on opening day! I HAD to. I just HAD to. 

I didn't. Again came that moment when I "fortuitously took my mettle out of mothballs". Balance ruled my pretty!

Perhaps I lean. I sway. I may even lightly touch the heart of OC but...Ding Dong! I believe the Doctor of Thinkology would say it IS the OZ that saves me. 

Are you wondering how I fared when reading Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West? My family didn't go hungry but they did forage for themselves for an evening... 

I did see The Great and Powerful Oz yesterday. LOVED it.

To read interesting tidbits of Oz trivia, click here. You can even see a scene that didn't make the final cut - the Jitterbug song where the Wicked Witch sends a mosquito like bug to bite Dorothy and her travel companions, causing them to fall into a dancing frenzy.