Saturday, February 14, 2009

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

I cannot remember which came first for me, viewing the 1939 film or reading the book itself. I have always had a copy of this book, ever since I can remember. I still have that copy, a little worse for wear, but still filled with the magic and amazing details that the film does not even begin to explore.
My childhood copy is hardback, bound in white with glorious color reproductions of Denslow's illustrations. Huge poppy flowers hover over Dorothy, as if they were ready to engulf her, Toto skips blissfully beside her. Dorothy does not look like Judy Garland at all, she is short and stout with enormous braids framing her Gibson girl face. She is doll like in her appearance, clearly just a young girl, "fresh from the farm". On the back cover, the Cowardly Lion is brushing tears away from his eyes with his tail, a huge poppy poised to engulf him also.
The book is filled with distinct details about Oz that the movie never even tries to explain. Glinda the Good Witch is not drowning a pink spun sugar gown, giggling away, rather, she is a stern but kind madonna, tall, stately, and empowered by her true love for her country and people. Oz isn't simply a place with a yellow brick road leading to a glorious city, it is a complex world divided into quadrants, all answerable to the emerald city and the ruling wizard, but each its own county with laws and leaders and rules to be followed (or ignored at your own peril). Glinda was in charge of the red quadrant, Quadling land. The Munchkins, or Munchkin land was blue, and ruled by the Wicked Witch of the East (crushed by Dorothy's house) and mourned by the Wicked Witch of the West. Glinda was more powerful than either of these evil sisters...but she really steps into being in other Oz books.
The ruby slippers were never ruby in the books. They became ruby for the technicolor film, but in the book they were always silver. I always found it annoying that the shoes in the story were not the beautiful and sparkly ruby red, but a dull pewter silver. The most important aspect of the shoes were that they took Dorothy home to Kansas, when she was ready to return. They protected her feet as she ran over the burning sands of the desert that surrounded the Land of Oz, and kept the rest of us out. The slippers slipped off her feet as she reached the deserts end...she never got to return to Kansas with anything from Oz, other than her memories.
Dorothy did have to discover herself and her friends while walking the yellow brick road to Oz. In some sections of the narrative, the road disappeared or faded into the county she was walking in, but she doggedly followed it to the Emerald City, looking for her return ticket.
I read the book frequently, as the story always enthralled me, but I was blessed to have my own collection of the other Oz books, that not everybody was aware existed. My great aunts and grandfather had read the books as children, and my great grandmother kept the volumes upstairs in "the girl's room" even though the girls were ancient by the time I was reading! I read every single copy of the 13 other tales, even when the books began to fall apart in my hands from wear. I loved them all, as they expanded and delighted my personal vision of Oz, introducing me to more and more fantastic and outrageous characters.
Dorothy morphed from a simple, dumpy, braided country girl to a snappy bobbed flapper child in a white sailor suit, with such snap and spunk that I truly wanted to be her for a while, just to have the freedom to explore that she embodied.
I am eternally grateful that someone named Frank L. Baum felt that American readers needed fairy tales of their own, and wrote 14 books filled with his imaginative stories.
There is no place like home, except for Oz...and I wanna go to Oz!

Sunday, February 8, 2009

Robin Hood and Little John and Friar Tuck

My next book of distinction would be "Robin Hood". The copy I read I still have, but it is rapidly returning to dust. The paper used for this edition has the thickest texture ever, the wood pulp used for must not have been ground down as finely as it could have been, it is chunky in your hands. As a result, this was not a good text to "dog ear" pages in, as the "ear" would snap off in your fingers. My book is riddled with missing upper page corners!

Robin Hood, Robin of Locksley, was a larger than life hero to me, especially since he was based on a real person! I clearly recall wanting to join Robin and his Merry Men, as they lived freely in Sherwood Forest , thumbing their noses at Prince John, and stealing from the rich to feed the poor. It always bothered me that there were no women romping in the woods with the boys, only Marion seemed to be granted that privilege...and I wanted to be her, badly.

Reading the book was only one aspect of enjoying this classic tale, acting it out became the next natural step in my Sherwood Forest devotion. Enter: Walt Disney and his magical animation studios. Disney produced a cartoon/animated version of Robin Hood in the middle '70's, and it is this film version that allowed my love affair to blossom. I was not alone in dramatic reinterpretation of Robin Hood, my best summer friend of all times, meg, was deep in the thick of our recreations too. It was her soundtrack vinyl record of Robin Hood, that came with read along stills from the film that became our "bible" for a summer.

We spent hours, at her house and at mine, reenacting key moments from the film. Never mind that Disney had "cutified" the entire story line, and made all of the characters into animals...we loved that film and recording. We mimicked every characters voice, tone, and cadence word for word, we didn't just say our lines, we became our lines. I have no idea how our mothers survived that summer, for Robin and Little John were alive and well in the woods of New Hampshire...constantly reminding the mothers hat we needed to steal that box of ring-ding snack cakes from the rich (them) for the poor (us). It didn't work very often, but we must have tried an awful lot, for Meg's mother, to this very day, still calls me "Jennifrair Tuck"...and I love it!

Post note: I lived on "Sherwood Drive" in NY, and Meg lived on "King Richards Drive"in NH and as a result, we felt that that it was in the cards to be Robin and Little John forever. Meg gave me the DVD version with Errol Flynn for Christmas one year, and I watch it at least once a year or so.

Saturday, February 7, 2009

All for one, one for all

When I was in third grade, I read the entire unabridged novel, The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas. I had found the book during one of the many book sales that my mother frequented, where she would buy books by the armful for practically nothing, and she always let me find a few gems of my own. The book sale had table after table of cast off books, dogeared, water damaged, brand new, musty, dusty and waiting to be loved books of all kind; beckoning and waiting for me to pet them and take them home.

This particular edition of the tale had a few illustrations in it, but it was a hefty, large tome, that felt right at home in my hands when I first opened it. I am not sure if my mother thought that I really would read the novel, but being an avid reader herself, I don't think she would have said no to me for wanting a 25 cent book as badly as I wanted this one. When we returned home, I opened up a new world that I have never forgotten, the world of France at war with England, of men who swore to protect their king, not matter what, with swords and wit, and of women who loved, left and longed for the swashbuckling hero who had just left their beds...I had no idea why so many people kept having "sleepovers" in the same bed, but it was pretty clear to me that Athos, Porthos, Aremis and d'Artagen liked their lives, and had a great deal of fun to boot!

I am sure that I didn't understand all of what was happening in the novel, but I spent an entire summer reading the story, and asking my mother a million questions about the action taking place, the history being told, the words I couldn't (still cannot) pronounce. My mother answered all of my inquires (she probably read the novel while I was sleeping) as best she could. She was my personal version of Wiipedia or Google back then! I had no idea how impressed she and my father were with my reading ability until a year or two later, when I overheard her talking to one of her friends about my voracious appetite to reading, and how she couldn't get enough books in my hands fast enough.

Soon enough, a new movie version appeared in the theaters, with Michael York and Rachel Welch potraying d'Artangen and Constance. Faye Dunaway as Milady, Christopher Lee and Cardinal Richelou...the movie was fun, campy, and not true to the true, but I loved it! My mother made sure I went to see the film, even though it was designed for an older audience (it was the early 1970's...way before PG 13!)

My love of reading, and for understanding history, has never gone away. I plan on posting all kinds of observations about my life, through what I have read, and am currrently reading. Join me on my adventure....through the pages I have turned, earmarked, and held onto.