Ding Dong the Witch is dead—but maybe we’re still up in the Balloon for Now

Ever since it was introduced in 1939 to the silver screen, the story of The Wizard of OZ, written by L Frank Baum, has captured the hearts of millions of us.  

As a child, it was on the television once a year on Sunday night—but should you stay home from church to watch, you were on the slippery slide to hell.  My family chanced it and did skip church (am still here to write this). Judy Garland as Dorothy Gale was this sweet, unassuming little girl up in Kansas, not far from us in NE Oklahoma.  Dorothy early on in the story has a run in with the town spinster, Almira Gulch (later on the bike).  Gulch is a dog hater (ok she was bitten) so Dorothy is defending poor Toto (a dog with a good judge of character like most) from being hauled off by the cops. She tries to get the attention of aunt Em and uncle Henry but gets blown off (literally in a few minutes).

Almira Gulch—our Hallmark ornament The sinister old lady/ the Wicked Witch

Oklahoma (my home state) and Kansas have a number of things in common, tornados for one.  The ‘root cellars’ in our back yards also served as shelters when the winds came.  Carved out of the earth these holes in the ground were where the homemade canned vegetables were stored in all those Mason and Kerr jars.  The dark corners and crannies of the cellar were also dark hideouts for spiders, snakes and occasional other varmints creating some hesitation on entering when the twisters threatened. The fear of howling winds won over our fears of snakes and bugs as folks headed for cover.  Our family did not have a root cellar so we spent many a summer night crouched in the center hallway of our small frame house listening to a radio as the siren atop my grade school, Celia Clinton Elementary, whaled a warning.  One tornado blew that siren off the roof.  During another we ventured outside in an eerie silence to see a dark mass of clouds swirling overhead slowly creeping by in the green afternoon sky. It was totally still to the point you could have heard a pin drop at the end of our block. So when Dorothy’s family started hollering “storm!”, been there, checked that box.

Before the storm hit Dorothy and Toto—the ultimate rescue dog—had slipped away after the incident with the crabby Almira.  Raised in Kansas by what I would confidently suspect good Christian folk, she begins to sing, Somewhere Over the Rainbow, a song that has stuck in many of our hearts forever.  Like the hymns we so often sang in church, most of us can sing Somewhere Over the Rainbow word for word.  Maybe it should be included in our Sunday songbook. 

Somewhere over the rainbow

Way up high

There's a land that I heard of

Once in a lullaby

Somewhere over the rainbow

Skies are blue

And the dreams that you dare to dream

Really do come true

Someday I'll wish upon a star

And wake up where the clouds are far behind me

Where troubles melt like lemon drops

Away above the chimney tops

That's where you'll find me

Somewhere over the rainbow

Bluebirds fly

Birds fly over the rainbow

Why then, oh, why can't I?

Somewhere over the rainbow

Bluebirds fly

Birds fly over the rainbow

Why then, oh, why can't I?

If happy little bluebirds fly

Beyond the rainbow

Why, oh why can't I?

Then disaster strikes, Dorothy and Toto are blown sky high, beyond the rainbow to the land of OZ where evil—or at least some of it—her house happens to crush.  She is immediately a hero with the little people, the Munchkins who live there. But before the celebration is over, Glinda, the ‘good’ witch comes floating in. (For the even more revealing saga go watch Wicked) All the little people are in cahoots and declares Dorothy’s only way back to Kansas is a trip to the Emerald City to see the Great Wizard of OZ. They cheerfully send her on her way on this beautiful yellow brick road (I love yellow), but don’t be fooled just yet.  

Dorothy meets her well known companions, the Scarecrow with no brain, the Tin man with no heart and the lion with no courage.  This motley crew heads to ‘Greenville’. (very random long lost memory, I was told in junior high if you wore green and yellow on Thursday, you were queer) At their first encounter with super Wizard they’re thrown a curve and sent back out to get the broom of yet another witch—the land of OZ has got it’s dark side.  So the foursome go trudging off to get the broom.  But Dorothy, in those suspicious red shoes, the light begins to dawn on her.  After being chased by flying monkeys (been there) and almost dying in a poppy field, she wises up, is thinking something is rotten in Denmark, (ok, OZ) and heads back to the Emerald City.  In the holy of holies her faithful dog, Toto, saves the day.  He is the one who pulls the curtain back revealing the little man with the bells and whistles, the pulleys and levers.  Bold woman that she is, she confronts this mousey old man who finally reveals ultimate truth.  She had the way home all the time—and the rest of her ragtag group already had within them what they longed for.  

Are you gettin any of the profound spiritual parallels?  WE are the ones on The Way, the yellow brick road, the road fraught with danger, wizards and all sorts of flying monkeys.  And, like Dorothy most of us travel a good while having listened to a number of Munchkins with their solutions as to the way to get home.  When the whole crowd is singing it, it easy to get sucked in.  So we take off down the yellow brick road.  

in Iceland

But, like Dorothy, if we are listening, watching we find out we’ve had The Way within us all the time.  Like the shoes, we didn’t know their power.  Like the scarecrow, the tin man and the lion, they had within them what they’d hungered for along the brick road.  We do too.

So as I hear IZ or Eva Cassidy sing Over the Rainbow, I am there again. There IS a place beyond all the colors of the rainbow where bluebirds DO fly.  There is a place beyond here and now, beyond the land of OZ I long for. 

It helps me sing when life gets hard—that a little girl from Kansas tells me again, chin up, look up—there is a place.  As Rilke says, I will meet you there. Just maybe IZ and Eva are already there—still singing to us from home. 

Hole onto your red shoes. 

“ Out beyond ideas of wrong and right, there is a field.  I’ll meet you there.  When the soul lies down in the grass.  Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other” doesn’t make sense.”  

Rainer Marie Rilke

Is it any wonder that the green and yellow queer kids in junior ended up flying a rainbow flag?