No Place Like

And the dreams that you dare to dream really do (or don't) come true

I’m little - maybe six or seven years old - and hiding behind my parents’ king size bed. Squeezed into the space on the floor on my dad’s side, just a narrow path of carpet that leads to the tiny bathroom. I’m crouched, barely peeping my head and the tops of my eyes over the bed to see what’s on the television screen.

I started, as usual, in the rocking chair, watching my favorite movie of all time, “The Wizard of Oz.” It’s the mid 1970s and the carpet is a soft dark purple. The bedspread (didn’t we call them that, then?) was a purple and red tangle of swirls and shapes. Red velvet pillows. It was damn near opulent, and I think we were all relieved when my mom entered her pastel era of the 1980s that would carry her through until her death four years ago.

We always watched Dorothy, as I called this movie, every year. My parents’ bedroom was big and had a rocking chair that Jim and I would share when we were little, and then I got kicked off to the bed or floor when we grew because Jim needed to rock that chair by himself.

No matter how many times I saw this movie, no matter how prepared I was for the closeup of Margaret Hamilton's green face, white eyes, and bright red tongue when the camera zooms in and she cackles that terrible cackle, I had to hide. Honestly, it was pretty intense for a little kid. Without fail, I jumped up, ran behind the bed, and peeped over the top because I both had to see her, and also put a king sized bed between us.

I was glad when she melted. And always a little sad, because somehow I knew she was lonely because lonely people can be so very mean.

If you think I’ve overthought and over-extrapolated the themes of this movie, you have no idea.

In Naples, Florida, where we vacationed every year, there was a restaurant called Kelly’s Fish House - I think it’s still there. One day, my dad thought he’d be funny and call it the “Smelly Fish House” and well, that was it for me. I irrationally no longer wanted to go there, because I believed it to now be smelly and therefore bad. I was a picky eater as a kid, and one (joking) name change could set me wailing. I cried and cried, and declared I would not eat there ever again. My clever mom, who would never make up a mean restaurant name to tease me, told me on our next trip that they had renamed the restaurant “Dorothy’s” and that was it for me, again. We never called it anything else, and every year I couldn’t wait to go to Dorothy’s for dinner. I guess I learned to read at some point and definitely knew what the sign and menu said, but that chokehold that word Dorothy had on me was so powerful.

When technology provided video rentals and VHS tapes and VCRs that recorded things, I could watch Dorothy every year, more than once! No waiting for that special holiday viewing that you had to be home to see, not for me.

It’s safe to say I have viewed the movie no fewer than 60 times. I’ve read the L. Frank Baum books, read the Wicked book, watched The Wiz, saw Wicked the musical, and now have fallen in love with the new movies. I even helped a friend in college write a term paper about World War 2 using the themes of good and evil, East and West, witches and soldiers, and misfits who feared for their very lives because they were different.

But what of our girl Dorothy? Her parents are dead, she lives with her serious and hardworking Aunt and Uncle, it’s the damn dustbowl to be sure, the farm hands are silly goof-offs, and that bitch of a spinster Miss Gulch wants Toto to be euthanized. Who among us wouldn’t run away?

I’ve dreamed of over the rainbow my whole life. I know there’s a place where dreams really do come true. There are master’s degrees, best-selling novels, apartments in New York, travel around the world over and over again, fur coats and nice jewelry and bodies that don’t get old and dreams that don’t die.

What preteen girl among us, fully into our hormones and feelings, hasn’t yelled at everyone in the house because NO ONE understands them, runs to her room or out of the house, slamming doors along the way? The dreams we all share of being somewhere that isn’t here right now but it’s a truly live place, where we can be understood and appreciated, and our dreams are waiting there for us.

Dorothy knew.

It’s interesting to see Dorothy in the Wicked: For Good movie. Instantly recognizable in her blue-checkered pinafore, braids, cute little anklet socks, and her band of merry misfits. We never see her face, but those of us who are a) of a certain generation; or b) of a certain obsession level knows it’s her and she’s there for a real purpose. But as we are swept up into the story of Wicked and those two women who are terribly flawed and lost and neither all good nor all bad, Dorothy’s purpose feels heavy and foreboding. She’s there to kill the Wicked Witch of the West, so she can go home to Kansas.

Believe what you will about how the book(s) and movie(s) and play all differ, and argue with me for days about what’s canon and what’s simply filler, but the portrayal of Dorothy in Wicked felt a little cruel to me. She’s a bratty little girl, according to the main characters, who just won’t go away. She seems in the way of the story at hand.

Which takes us right back to that feeling of being in the way when we’re young and all wrong and our bodies and brains and dreams and emotions don’t work together properly. Judy Garland was 16 when The Wizard of Oz was filmed. She had a woman’s body and they wrapped and taped her breasts and gave her diet pills to make her into a little girl. Horrible, the path they put Judy on that would come to define her life and death in being lost and both infantilized and womanized, drugged and molded into something she wasn’t. I wonder what Judy’s dreams were, and if she finally found them over the rainbow.

Smithsonian, March of 2025, me-n-Dorothy.

What was it like for my mom, age 10 in 1939, watching The Wizard of Oz in the theater? Did she love it? Did she feel like Dorothy? My mom’s family was poor and the Great Depression was only just starting to ease, the world was at war and Americans knew it was only a matter of time for us. At age 10, did she know and think of these things? Did the witch scare her like she scared me? Seeing her on the big screen in Technicolor must have been terrifying.

Note: Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch, was reported to be a very kind and gentle woman who absolutely adored children and it became a real sadness to her that children remained afraid of her, even outside of her makeup and costumes.

In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy wakes up from her dream, which I will always think was more than a dream. Everyone is there, and it turns out that over the rainbow was only in her mind. Sure, there’s No Place Like Home, but did she wake up the next day, and the day after that, wondering what she might have missed out on by coming home? Did she ever leave Kansas and go to college? Get married and have kids and travel to Paris and have a cool job and die an old woman knowing her dreams that she dreamed really did come true?

The curse of the Gemini is a feeling of restlessness. The next best thing is coming up, we think. I am, however, fully and absolutely present in the knowledge of there being no place like home. Home is the best. In 58 years, I’ve stayed very close to it, only to venture out in travel. But over the rainbow is always there, always whispering, sometimes with the melody of hope, often times with the dissonance of regret.

The real harmony is in the here right now. When over the rainbow wasn’t all Dorothy dreamed of, she put together a band of chosen family and ventured bravely into grave danger so she could get home. I’ve thrown a few buckets of water at witches in my time - cruel church men, mean-girl former friends, shitty bosses and coworkers, and my own mother from time to time so I could get home to myself.

That’s the No Place Like for me. Being home in myself, whether chasing my dreams or visiting a new city, I belong to me. Surrounded by Karl and my kids and my friends and community, but finding my own home inside my own soul and body and dreams. I can see the rainbow from right here.