The mantra will get you home, the shoes will get you fucked

Jody wants to do an adaptation of a book and asks, "Velveteen Rabbit or Wizard of Oz?" First, L. Frank Baum's classic has been adapted to death, and nothing tops the original. Second, I think Velveteen Rabbit would make a killer horror story, don't you? I would read it to my grandchildren...but only in the morning cuz if I read it to them at night, they would have to stay awake for hours having to calm me down. I mean, I got seriously freaked over the rabbit in Spamalot...

When I was younger, so much younger than today, I never needed help in any way...oh, sorry, I mean, when I was younger, we watched the Wizard of Oz every single year. My mom would jiffy pop some corn, we would sit three in a row in front of the black and white tv with the long plastic tuning stick that could be inserted in a little hole on the front of the tv, sort of a prehistoric rabbit ears (not the scary kind like the Velveteen Rabbit murder mystery adaptation I will read later in life and not the chocolate Easter Bunny kind that my dad used to eat before we could have even a single bite), and we would watch this wonderful show about color - ruby slippers, yellow brick road, emerald city, horse of a different color - we would watch this colorful show...in black and white.

And then we got a new tv. And we sat with our popcorn and tuning stick (what did we know? We were kids and the tuning stick was part of the experience!) and watched Dorothy fall into the pigpen, and watched her ugly neighbor ride helter skelter on a rickety two-wheeler, and watched her stamp her petulent foot against the closed and locked cellar door, and watched her clutching Toto tightly as her bed was flung from side to side and watched as EVERYTHING. WENT. STILL.

I remember that moment, on this new TV, when Dorothy opened the door and looked outside and saw...color.

We gasped! I couldn't breathe! We had no idea the horse really was a different color! And the RUBY SLIPPERS!!! They were, to my young mind, the MOST BEAUTIFUL SHOES IN THE WORLD. Oh, I was in love for the first time and it was with a pair of shoes.

Of course, years later I realized those weren't really rubies on the slippers, they were stupid sequins. Thoroughly disillusioned, I quit liking shoes and went on to liking boys instead...from a distance because I was shy.

Then I got married and had kids of my own and started reading books to them, books like The Velveteen Rabbit and The Wizard of Oz and...WHOA! Back the buggy drawn by a Horse of a Different Color up! The ruby slippers were...(GASP!) SILVER! Whaaaat??

My entire childhood went swirling clockwise down the toilet. Clearly, L. Frank Baum was not aware the value of silver was decreasing while the Technicolor value of rubies was skyrocketing. And the Emerald City? It was only emerald IF THEY KEPT THEIR GLASSES ON.

I haven't watched the movie or read the book since (although I did enjoy Gregory Maguire's adaptation, Wicked; I saw the play as well, with Jody, and of course it differed in significant ways from Maquire's vision, and not improvements I might add. Why can't people leave good enough alone? Is it because we are taught from early on about good, better and best, to never let them rest until good is better and better is...well not quite as good as good was, but sequels stretch a buck to a buck fifty?)

People often wonder what was in Baum's mind when he wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. My literary angelica thinks the book and movie are all about capitalism. I personally think it's much simpler than that - to me, it's about searching for our self.

Dorothy isn't content with her plain jane life, and the discontent she feels deep in her soul launches her on a tumultuous journey into exploring other ways of life where she gets down and cozy with thoughtlessness, fear and a callous attitude towards everything. Along the way, she is haunted by evil thoughts which vie with her own inner bubbly goodness, and she is simultaneously awed by the rich color of other lifestyles while realizing they are not going to fill the void in her soul, the void that longs to find a place called "home." She gets quite confused about what she wants from life until one day, in a moment of remarkable clarity, (perhaps the opium wore off?), she realizes she isn't so very far from home after all, because home isn't a house or a farm or an emerald green lifestyle, home is in our souls and that is where we should look for it, it was there all along.

Merriam Webster's online dictionary lists nineteen definitions for the word home. And in over three hundred words, it still cannot completely convey that feeling we recognize when we are well and truly home.

The Irish lass hosted Candlelight Supper last month, and we laughed and ate and opened pressies, she and I and other close friends. She'd put up a tree and lit candles and even laid out the traditional Christmas Crackers, you know, the ones that you pull the ends on and there's a popping sound and a trinket flies out along with a joke that a 7 yr. old might have written?

And when I popped my cracker, a compass fell out and I picked it up and looked at it, at the wobbly needle pointing somewhere between north and northwest, and I looked around me, past the colored lights and colorful friends, and I realized in a moment of startling clarity, that I was well and truly home.

I spent years being someone I was never meant to be with only bits and pieces of the real me popping out now and again, I came far too close to being swallowed by my own evil thoughts, and I was no longer interested in the answers being given by a silly man behind a curtain. Somewhere along the line, I made a wish as deep and heartfelt as it could be, and I was home.

And it didn't take a fancy pair of shoes to get me there, although a new pair of shoes would be nice. Which do you think, silver or ruby?