There is Hollywood and then there is the book before Hollywood gave it a treatment.

My maternal grandmother in Omaha, Nebraska lived in a big house with a basement, an attic, and a dining room on which she hung commemorative plates from travels to tourist meccas.  She smelled Avon sweet and kept the bottles from that which the smell derived on display in a case in that dining room.  She was a teenager when my mother was born.  She raised her while living with her own mother during World War II when my grandfather was in war on some island off Japan.  He pretended to be dead after a lost battle when Japanese soldiers walked the bloody aftermath with bayonets.  He got home to tell the tale once or twice.  Then he just stopped telling it and became a very good plumber.

I thought my maternal grandmother was very old.  She had warts.  She seemed heavy.  She had a bunch of teenage sons in the house to raise along with my uncle who was a full year older than I was.

My grandfather became angry with anyone who questioned his wife’s weight or her beauty.  I never met his mother or my great-grandmother because she died when he was a boy I guess sometime in the 1930s.  Liposuction is nothing new but doing it right apparently is.  My grandfather’s mother gained a lot of weight and was self-conscious about it. The story that was told to me was that she died on the table when being vacuumed either bleeding out or ceasing to be when a major organ was compromised.

The reconstruction of my torso after a major mastectomy requires several small follow-up operations in which my fat is harvested through liposuction.  That fat is then used to improve the new breasts.  I think of that great-grandmother every time I go in for surgery.  She had small children and died just to be thin. Liposuction hurts.

So my maternal grandmother must have been all of 45-years-old when I was seven and she told me where she kept her Wizard of Oz books.

There is Hollywood and then there is the book before Hollywood gave it a treatment.

I read all her Wizard of Oz books. There was a series just like Twilight or the Hunger Games.  The books were not really like the movies. There were the same characters in similar settings but that was it.  The Wizard of Oz was the Hunger Games of the depression.

. . . there is the book before Hollywood gave it a treatment.

In the book the Wizard reveals himself to Dorothy and her partners in crime . . .

“I was born in Omaha . . .”

“Why, that isn’t very far from Kansas!” cried Dorothy.

“No, but it is very very far from here,” he said, shaking his head at her sadly.  “When I grew up I became a balloonist.”

….

“Well, one day I went up in the balloon and the ropes got twisted, so I couldn’t come down again.  It went way up above the clouds, and the wind carried it many, many miles away.”

“It came down slowly and I was not hurt a bit.  But I found myself in the midst of a strange people, who seeing me come from the clouds, thought I was the great Wizard.  Of course I let them think so, because they were afraid of me and they promised to do anything that I wished them to do.”

“Just to amuse myself, and keep the good people busy, I ordered them to build this City and my Palace.  They did it all willingly and well.  Then I thought, as the country was so green and beautiful, I would call it the Emerald City.  I have been good to the people, and they like me.  But ever since the Palace was built, I have shut myself up and would not see any of them.”

“My greatest fear was of the witches of the East and West, for they were terribly wicked.  They thought I was powerful and terrible, so they left me alone.  Still, I lived in deadly fear of them for many years.  So you can imagine how pleased I was when I heard your house had fallen on the Wicked Witch of the East. When you came to me, I was willing to promise anything if you would only do away with the other Witch.  But now that you have melted her, I am ashamed to say that I cannot keep my promises.”

“I think you are a very bad man,” said Dorothy.

“Oh, no, my dear.  I’m really a very good man, but I am a very bad Wizard, I must admit.”

There is Hollywood . . .

I remember Dorothy running after Toto in the storm when they find the gypsy caravan.  The old man who sells snake oil to the masses soothes Toto and comes out to talk to her.   I always thought the actor who played the old man was very old but he must have been in his late fifties.  When I think about that scene I mainly remember the caravan and wonder where the man had been and how he got such a cool place to live.

I remember Dorothy’s anger and the bravado masking pain when the wizard orders, “Do not look at the man behind the curtain.”

. . . there is the book before Hollywood gave it a treatment.

In the book to escape from Oz the wizard decides . . .

I’ve been thinking the matter over, and I believe I can make a balloon for us.”

“Us!” exclaimed the girl. “Are you going, too?”

“Yes, of course,” replied Oz.  “I am tired of being such a humbug.  If I should get out of this Palace, my people would soon discover I am not a Wizard, and then they would be angry with me for having lied to them.  So I have to stay shut up in these rooms all day and it gets tiresome.”

So my maternal grandmother must have been all of 45-years-old when I was seven and my grandmother told me where she kept her Wizard of Oz books.

I was a little girl sitting in my grandmother’s dining room reading and dreaming about flying away from life’s responsibilities over the desert with an old man making my own magic.

Go figure.