Somewhere, way under the rainbow (flash fiction)
She couldn’t really say anything clever about tornadoes this year. Not after Joplin, not after Springfield. Lives lost and homes lost and yet …
“What if it all ended differently?” a little boy in the back, a geeky kind of little boy, the kind who wants to come to a museum, not the kind who wishes that vacation had more ball fields, swimming in the lake and comic-book themed movies.
“It did!” one of a trio of faces in pre-thick-tably green makeup -- Elphaba-green, though Dorothy knew that none of them wanted to be Elphaba-outcast. All teenage girls want to be Galinda-popular. They must have been listening, even with thumbs flexing faster than flying monkeys. Dorothy guessed that they were texting each other, standing inches apart. (Look, girls, look for the fraud behind the curtain of technology.)
“It did! The Wicked Witch wasn’t … you know …”
Dorothy, the good docent (the formerly-good college student until she left under suspicion of cheating) did not wait to hear whether the girls favored the Gregory Maguire conclusion to Wicked or conversely, the Stephen Schwartz musical happy ending. Converse -- as different as Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Mermaid to Disney’s version. That had blown Dorothy out of the water when she was a little girl. (Her parents made it perfectly clear she was not a little girl … or rather their little girl anymore.)
“Let’s move on. I want to show you the ruby slippers.”
That demonstrated where this second-rate museum stood in the granddaddy of all book-versus-show debates. L. Frank Baum wrote about silver slippers and her museum (this other Oz museum, the one that claimed Nebraska was the original Kansas) had ruby slippers designed for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to showcase the new three strip Technicolor process. The real Oz museum in Wamego, Kansas also went with red -- original Gilbert Adrian slippers in Judy Garland size four. Dorothy suspected these facsimiles were in stand-in Bobbie Koshay size six.
She wished she could go home, even if home were black and white. Maybe she would settle for losing her job.
“The way the story ended? You folks want to know how it really ended? Well, you start with the character with the most reputation to lose -- the cowardly lion, of course. How many of you have seen ‘NCIS’ or ... ‘Crossing Jordan’? ‘Body of Proof’ or … (she assessed the average age) ‘Quincy’?”
Now she had the geeky boy, probably the texting girls, too. Just Ducky.
“The cowardly lion needed courage. Not a Pulitzer. And his friends needed a brain and a heart. Am I right?”
The room was silent, still as the eye of a storm.
“So the way the story really ended, I have it on the best authority, is that the cowardly lion with poppy juice courage killed Dorothy and autopsied her. He gave her heart to Tin Man and her brain to Scarecrow. That is what men do -- dance down the yellow brick road with you, then, cut, take and give away. That, my friends, is how The Wizard of Oz really ends.
Her smart phone vibrated. She slipped it half out of her pocket. Photo of the trashcan on two legs with her heart (Go grease yourself …).
She had pity on her stunned little tour group. “Next our dog breeding display focuses on Toto’s remarkable intelligence …” The other side of the Plexiglas was faux field and real bicycle with a front basket. A diagram compared the dimensions of the basket with the traditionally suggested dogs - Cairn terrier, Yorkshire terrier and Boston terrier. The group dutifully voted for breed by pulling one of three levers.
When she was a child they used live dogs in this display. Now it was considered cruel. Dorothy explained that Toto is silent in the book while other animals talk. Baum’s later book TikTok of Oz assertss that Toto is able to talk but chooses not to do so. (Like a roommate) The movie dog star named Terry earned $125 a week, more than some human actors, more than the hay brain’s deposit to her account, conveniently timed as if to pay for the American Lit paper.
The little boy (if she were a better docent, Dorothy would ask his name) had his hand up. “In … your version does Toto get to go home even after Dorothy is dead.”
“In my version she would rather stay behind and be the pet of a certain ‘literary lion.’”