The Wizard of Oz

Cowardly Lion: Courage! What makes a king out of a slave? Courage! What makes the flag on the mast to wave? Courage! What makes the elephant charge his tusk in the misty mist, or the dusky dusk? What makes the muskrat guard his musk? Courage! What makes the sphinx the seventh wonder? Courage! What makes the dawn come up like thunder? Courage! What makes the Hottentot so hot? What puts the "ape" in apricot? What have they got that I ain't got?
Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Woodsman: Courage!
Cowardly Lion: You can say that again! Huh?
~The Wizard of Oz, 1939 film
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This came today from Out of Print Clothing.  I've been waiting almost a month for it since I pre-ordered it when they first announced they were going to make it.  When they first brought out the design, it was only in their children's tees, and needless to say, I could not quite see myself fitting into one of those.

I love the design of the shirt.  It has everything I admire, vintage charm, my beloved books, famous art, archetypal characters, nifty colors.  More than this, though, while I've never been a hardcore WoO fan, I realized lately this work has started to sneak into the corners of my life while I haven't been paying attention in unexpected ways.  I reflected on how pervasive it is today as I unfolded my shirt.

Dorothy's Shoes
National History Museum

First and foremost is the famous pair of red sparkly shoes.  Dorothy's shoes have become an item of fascination for me.  I finally got to see the real thing (or one incarnation of them, anyway, since multiple pairs from the film exist) in the National History Museum when I was in DC.  To me, they represent the idea that we have the power to make the changes that we need for ourselves, power that we don't even know we have, magic if we would only recognize it and employ it properly.

When we were in London, we saw The Wizard of Oz musical, and something else about the shoes struck me for the first time.  Dorothy sees the shoes as a burden while the Witch is trying to get them.  The thing she is trying to get rid of, the thing she hates about herself, actually turns out to have been the solution to her problem all along.  She couldn't understand what was important or enviable about the gift she'd been given.  I wonder how often the rest of us are in that same situation about the gifts that we have.

The other thing I seem to be surrounded by without it being intentional is character references.  They keep coming up in odd places.  One of my best friends and I have long said, "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!" as one of our little in-jokes for when something stupid has occurred and we need everybody to look away.  I have an intermittent conversation/joke with somebody about the Tin Man.  The bit of song concerning the Scarecrow, "If I only had a brain," has been used as a codephrase more than once with my friends and family for acts of great "brilliance," personal or otherwise.  I have thought several times about getting one of the signs about the flying monkeys to put in my classroom.

Palladium Theater, London

Everybody has a favorite character, I guess.  I'm not much on Dorothy despite the shoes.  I enjoyed it in Wicked when she gets turned into the enemy, in fact.  It satisfied something I'd felt since I was a child; all that wide-eyed innocence and checked gingham just can't be trusted....  I love the trio of guys.  I go back and forth between the Scarecrow with his wonderful loyalty, humor, and secret cleverness and the Tin Man with his backstory and his brave actions motivated by feeling he doesn't even know he has as my favorites.

Just as everyone has a favorite, I think everybody probably recognizes themselves in one of the characters to some degree or another, too.  I personally am not a singing-ingenue Dorothy or a head-scratching Scarecrow.  I can't say I'm a hollow-chested Tin Man, either.  I see myself in the Cowardly Lion.  When they sing their songs, his is the one that resonates with me.  I have "the heart" and the "brain."  Too often what I think I need to grasp what I want in life is "the nerve."  I think too much (like my beloved Hamlet) about the consequences, the what-comes-next, and I do not take the opportunities that are put in front of me.  Not in everything, in so many things I have no fear at all, but in the really serious things, the issues of the heart, I am just like the Lion, looking for a hiding place, quaking in fear.

Maybe someday, I'll have his epiphany, realize that the courage I need is inside me all the time, "be a lion, not a mowess."  That is, after all, the overarching message of the entire work, that everything you need has always been there waiting for you the whole time to discover:  your true home, your true inner strength, your intelligence, your courage, your love.  That thing you think you never had or had lost was actually just waiting with love and patience for you to wrap your hands around it and take it up again.  It was never lost at all.

Perhaps that is what makes all incarnations of The Wizard of Oz intriguing and delightful whether it's Syfy's Tin Man, that musical in the West End, the 1939 film, or the original book.  This is what makes it such a rich source for reinterpretation and myth of its own.  It's so strong that it can even be deconstructed, rebuilt through a different lens and survive.  Take a look at Wicked (both the book and the musical, two very different creatures) for proof of that.  (I find it interesting that even though the focus character changes completely with Wicked, so much of the message stays remarkably the same....)

Tomorrow, I'll wear my new shirt happily.  Maybe it will give me some additional fortitude to face whatever challenges the day might bring me.  There's no way that could possibly be a bad thing.  I'll take any help I can get.