The Wizard of Oz

The gray place and the wind

Dorothy lived in the middle of the great gray prairie with her Uncle Henry and her Aunt Em, in a little house with one room and no cellar to speak of.

Everything there was gray. The grass was gray and the house was gray and the sky was gray, and Aunt Em had been young and pretty once but the sun and the wind had taken the color out of her too. The only thing on that whole flat prairie that was not gray was Toto, who was a small black dog with funny wee eyes and a habit of being underfoot, and it was Toto who made Dorothy laugh and saved her from growing as gray as everything else.

Then one afternoon the grass began to move in long low waves, and Uncle Henry stood up very suddenly and said one word.

"Cyclone."

There was a great deal of shouting after that, and running, and Toto jumping out of Dorothy's arms and hiding under the bed. And by the time she had him again the house was turning.

Somewhere a good deal more colorful

The house went up and it went round and then it went along, for hours, in the middle of the wind, and Dorothy did the sensible thing and fell asleep.

She woke because it had stopped.

Outside the door was a country so green and so full of flowers that it hurt to look at. There were trees with fruit on them and a stream running and birds in extraordinary colors, and coming towards her across the grass were three very small people in blue and one old woman who was not small at all.

"You are welcome, most noble Sorceress," said the old woman, and bowed.

Dorothy said that there had been some mistake, because she was not a sorceress and was in fact eight years old.

The old woman pointed at the corner of the house. Underneath it, with only two feet sticking out, lay the Wicked Witch of the East, who had held the Munchkins in slavery for a very long time and was now extremely and permanently under a house.

On the feet were a pair of silver shoes.

The road, and the man who wanted a brain

Dorothy did not want to stay, however green it was. She wanted Kansas, which was gray and flat and had Aunt Em in it.

"Then you must go to the City of Emeralds," said the old woman, "and ask Oz." She pointed to a road that began at their feet and was paved with yellow brick. "Follow that. Do not step off it."

So Dorothy put on the silver shoes, which fitted exactly, and she and Toto set off.

Partway through the first day she came to a cornfield with a scarecrow in it, and the scarecrow winked at her.

He was made of straw in an old blue suit, and he was very glad to be lifted off his pole, and he was quite certain about his one great problem.

"I have no brains," he explained. "Only straw. So I am going to ask this Oz for some."

Dorothy said he seemed to be talking perfectly well for a man with no brains, and the Scarecrow said that was exactly the sort of thing people said, and came along anyway.

The man who wanted a heart, and the lion who wanted courage

In the forest they found a man made entirely of tin, standing quite still with his axe in the air, rusted solid by a rainstorm a year before.

They oiled his joints. It took some time. When his jaw worked again the first thing he said was thank you, and the second thing was that he would like to come with them and ask Oz for a heart, because he had been made without one and could therefore not love anybody.

Then, further on, something enormous came roaring out of the trees and knocked the Scarecrow flat and went for Toto — and Dorothy, without stopping to think about it at all, ran forward and slapped the Lion on the nose.

The Lion sat down and began to cry.

He cried for some while. He was, he said, a coward. He roared because it was expected of him and he was frightened of absolutely everything and he was a disgrace to lions, and if this Oz had any courage going spare he would very much like some.

So there were four of them on the road after that, and a dog.

What happened on the way

It is worth saying what they did on that road, because of what comes later.

When a ditch too wide to jump stopped them, it was the Scarecrow who worked out that the Tin Woodman should cut down a tree to bridge it — and the Scarecrow who thought of it again, differently, when the next ditch was wider still.

When they had to cross the ditch with something terrible coming after them, it was the Lion who carried them over one at a time on his back, and who stood at the edge shaking from nose to tail and did not move until every one of them was across.

And when the Tin Woodman stepped on a beetle without meaning to, he cried so much that his jaw rusted shut, and Dorothy had to oil him again, and he was very careful where he put his feet for the rest of the journey.

None of them noticed any of this. They were busy walking to see a wizard.

The man behind the curtain

The Emerald City was green from one end to the other, and Oz would see them one at a time, and Oz was terrifying — a great head, a lovely lady, a ball of fire, depending on who went in — and Oz said that he would grant nothing at all until they had dealt with the Wicked Witch of the West.

That is a longer story than we have tonight. It has flying monkeys in it. It ends with a bucket of water, and a witch, and Dorothy being extremely surprised at what water can do.

They came back. They had done the thing. And they stood in the great hall and waited, and nothing happened, until Toto knocked over a screen in the corner of the room.

Behind it was a small old man with a bald head and a wrinkled face, looking thoroughly caught.

"I am Oz," he said unhappily. "The Great and Terrible. Please don't shout at me."

He was from Omaha. He had come to Oz in a balloon by accident and they had made him a wizard on the spot, and he had been dreading this exact afternoon for years.

"You're a humbug," said the Scarecrow.

"I am," the little man agreed. "I'm a very good one, though."

What he gave them

He gave the Scarecrow a head full of bran and pins, and told him he was now extremely sharp. He gave the Tin Woodman a silk heart stuffed with sawdust and put it in his chest. He gave the Lion a green drink and said it was courage, and the Lion drank it all and felt magnificent.

None of it was real. Every single one of them walked out taller.

Because here is the thing the little man from Omaha had noticed while they were standing in his hall, and had the good sense to say out loud: the Scarecrow had been thinking for the whole journey, and the Tin Woodman had wept over a beetle, and the Lion had walked at every frightening thing on that road while frightened the entire time. They had come a very long way to be given something each of them had already been doing since the day they met.

What he could not do was Kansas. Balloons are unreliable. It took the silver shoes in the end, which had been on Dorothy's feet the whole time, and which needed only three knocks of the heels together and asking properly.

And then a gray prairie, and a gray house, and Aunt Em running out of the door.