The Wizard of Oz and Kansas

The first time I saw the Wizard of Oz, I was staying overnight with my aunt Renee and uncle Clint.  I was 8 years old, and while I had never seen the movie, growing up in Topeka, Kansas, it was as if I had been born with intimate knowledge of the film. I knew all the major characters and even the plot line.   I remember vibrating with excitement that I would finally get to see the movie that was the sole reason anyone outside of Kansas had ever heard of the place.

My aunt and uncle weren't well off.  My aunt didn't work and my uncle was a junior mechanic in a garage somewhere in East Topeka.  Their home was a small one-floor rental in a house a mile or so away from my grandparents, and clear across town from my own home.  Both were high school dropouts, and neither of them had seen the Wizard of Oz since they were little kids themselves. This was in the time before VHS or DVD. 

Their television was a tiny twelve inch color set with knobs and dials, and rabbit ear antennae twice as tall precariously perched on the 70s-style-rounded top.  We gathered around it and sat inches away as the CBS logo faded and revealed... a black and white, drab  soundstage meant to be Kansas.  Dorothy was pretty, in a plain dress, and Toto was cute, but a bit ugly and not the kind of dog that anyone I knew owned--it was not a hunting dog.

It was the black and white part that I can't forget.  Confused, my aunt and uncle began to fiddle with the color dials on the screen.  "I thought this was in color," my aunt said.  "I swear this was in color when I saw it."  And so they assumed that the television had suddenly lost it's color.  Every knob that could be adjusted, was adjusted.  The antennae were repositioned.  The television was even given a hearty thwack on the side a couple of times.

They threw up their hands sometime just before the tornado scene and retired to the kitchen to do dishes.  I watched, not really able to follow what was going on.  I understood the tornado part, though, and it was exciting. I had always wondered what it would be like to be sucked up inside one of them. 

And then, like magic, color!  The munchin land was purple-green, and Dorthy's skin was deep red.  All the fiddling from before had thrown the color balance off so badly that I thought the Wizard of Oz was supposed to be some kind of 60's acid trip.  It looked like one of my dad's album covers.  Which was pretty awesome, actually.

Then the singing started, and I kind of lost interest.  My aunt and uncle came back into the room and realized their mistake, laughing at themselves, and fixed the color.  To this day, I find the normal colors of the wizard of oz kind of strange to look at.

That was my introduction to a body of work that followed me through my life from then on.  After my mother married for a second time and moved to Texas, we visited her in the summer.  The other children, when we told them where we were from, took to calling us after the characters in the Wizard of Oz.  My sister was always Dorothy, me, the Tin Man.  We hated it, and soon, we hated the Wizard of Oz.  I threatened to beat up anyone who would call me that, which was amusing, coming from a skinny little nerd with glasses, bad teeth, and Dumbo-sized ears.  All things considered, of all the things I was called growing up, Tin Man was probably the least offensive.  But at stake was not just our personal honor, but somehow, the honor of our drab little state.  Kansas was something more than the black and white place that Dorothy escapes from, wasn't it?

I wasn't able to articulate my fondness for my home until I was in junior high, and as part of my civics class, taught by a germophobe and borderline psychotic who once made national news for biting a dog that had bitten him while jogging.  We were assigned an essay, to write about where we were from.  This being a college town, not many of the others were actually native to Kansas.  I envied the Californians and New Yorkers.  They were from some place important!  But it would have made me furious to hear any of them actually say such a thing.

The essay made me think about the things I liked about growing up in Kansas, and by this point, I had spent some time in Arkansas and Texas, so I had something to compare it to.  And it wasn't all bad.  Thunderstorms in Kansas are like no other.  The part of Kansas I am from is green with tree-covered rolling hills. Our soil is the blackest on Earth, and you can grow a vegetable garden without trying.  There are wild things there still.  The people are friendly and polite.  And they know what safe following distance on the highway really is.

I still can't watch the Wizard of Oz without getting a little angry about how it portrays Kansas, but the Disney-made sequel is palatable. I always liked its bizzare clockwork man and the rollerblading minons.  And I'm looking forward to the "re-imagining" that the SciFi Channel is launching next month:  Tin Man.  But it better watch the shit-talking when it comes to Kansas. 

It's not all creationists and pro-lifers.