Memories and shit
I was just remembering--I used to be a total Oz junkie when I was a kid. I hadn't really thought about it in a while, but I might go to Chicago to see Wicked with the Theater department (although I have lost my checkbook and therefore need to purchase new checks), and I did "Over the Rainbow" as my audition song for the musical (didn't get in, because I'm not in choir or a ballerina). And I was just looking though this pop-up The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and commenting on how the style of the drawings is clearly based on the original illustrator, who wasn't the same original illustrator for the sequels, and how unfortunate it was that there was a pop-up of the hammerheads when the abridgment had cut them out of the text. And then I remembered when I read Wicked and Son of a Witch and thought--this is Oz for grownups. This is the Oz of the neverending sequels by L. Frank Baum and others, Oz that's been promoted into a higher plane of reality from whence even wireless telegraph signals cannot penetrate, and Glinda still reads our fates in her book. Except it's an Oz with, you know, sex and politics and murder and things. (Son of the Witch had possibly the hottest non-explicit sex scene I have ever read.) And, OK, it is an incredibly amazing story, and everything, but I remember finishing the book and thinking, you couldn't make that a musical without getting rid of all the best parts. But, you know, I still want to see the musical, because I am kind of a theater person.
And I've been thinking a lot recently about what I remember that you might not expect. Because I don't necessarily remember everything other people do, everything that might be "important". But, I dunno, I remember my second grade class play fairly well. And I was hanging out with Zach on Monday and for some reason I mentioned that I used to have my Dear America books organized by color, because they all had identical spines, and the order didn't really matter, and besides, chronological order gets dicey when you have so many books set in e.g. the 1840s. And he was all incredulous, like, why didn't you organize them by title? And I said, I don't own those books any more, and I don't remember the titles--but I do remember the colors. Like the Oregon Trail one was kind of a grey-blue. And there were paint chips around, so he was all, can you pick it out on a paint chip? And I could. (And yet I couldn't remember theta crit on my physics final to save my life . . .)
And I've been thinking a lot recently about what I remember that you might not expect. Because I don't necessarily remember everything other people do, everything that might be "important". But, I dunno, I remember my second grade class play fairly well. And I was hanging out with Zach on Monday and for some reason I mentioned that I used to have my Dear America books organized by color, because they all had identical spines, and the order didn't really matter, and besides, chronological order gets dicey when you have so many books set in e.g. the 1840s. And he was all incredulous, like, why didn't you organize them by title? And I said, I don't own those books any more, and I don't remember the titles--but I do remember the colors. Like the Oregon Trail one was kind of a grey-blue. And there were paint chips around, so he was all, can you pick it out on a paint chip? And I could. (And yet I couldn't remember theta crit on my physics final to save my life . . .)