Not Oz

It was quiet. There was no interest in social activities. People had forgotten to root for their favorite teams. Nobody went to parties. Nobody celebrated a birthday or an anniversary. No more walks in the park or hiking trails. Even the weather had fallen out of grace with those still trying to hold conversations. Television programming was so disastrous that nobody watched anything except for the occasional South Park episode or Gordon Ramsey’s Hell’s Kitchen. It was hard enough to get up in the morning, shower, and go to work. Most people wished they could have their cup of coffee, then crawl back into bed again.

Some had tried to take up a new hobby, but most of the time they didn’t stick with it for long. Why should they? It was boring and none of those who signed up for art workshops or guitar lessons ever felt the enthusiasm to continue. On top of that, there was inflation and so fewer and fewer people felt they could purchase supplies, sports equipment, ingredients for baking, etc. The focus was on staying afloat.

Everyone was exhausted. There had been many months of waiting, praying (some, anyway), hoping. Months of watching the calendar, counting the days until… Months of getting hopes up, only to have them dashed on the sharp rocks of reality. It just wasn’t happening. We knew we had to get on with our lives, heads bent, shoulders hunched over, feet shuffling. All of these were signs of desperation and angst. There was a long tunnel - we’d been in it for months - but there was no light at the end of it. We weren’t dead, but it sure felt like it.

We knew we were deeply mired in our despair, and we knew why, yet couldn’t shake it off. It was hard to remember to walk the dog, take out the trash, or put gas in the tank. So distracted were we that we needed to make lists for everything: getting groceries, taking back library books, picking up prescriptions. We didn’t want to do any of those things, but managed to derive a modicum of pleasure from checking things off our lists or crossing them off. Occasionally we drove to a store, any store, pulled into the parking lot, and sat for an hour, screwing up our courage to get out, run an errand, then hurry back home to collapse from exhaustion. The exhaustion was the result of trying not to think, of tying up our feelings in the pit of our stomachs and accepting that the numbness we had constructed was the best we were going to get. Few had read Orwell, but almost everyone knew the story. We also knew, contrary to the optimistic phrase, that the world was not our oyster. We didn’t have much and we didn’t dare think about how things had changed in recent years, how we’d never be normal again. Not when every word was being recorded somewhere and not many words were allowed. Heads down, noses to the grindstone, a small bowl of popcorn Saturday night. Not much was allowed anymore.

Then everything changed. Most people were asleep when the news came, but it was a wonderful thing to wake up to. We were tempted to link arms like the characters in the Wizard of Oz film and sing: “Ding, dong, the witch is dead!” Because she was, all four hundred pounds of her with her doughy arms and legs, her Brillo hair, her waffly skin, and especially her beady eyes that were the color of rotten olives. We wouldn’t miss her polka dot dresses and her Texas drawl that was so perfect for spelling reality out for us. She had been the head of the biggest news syndicate and had run our lives for far too long. Nobody cared much about the cause of her demise, although there was lots of speculation. Maybe it was natural causes, maybe it was the work of a secret bold hand. Maybe it was all those injections and transfusions that she’d been given. We’d all seen the darkened, bruised hands, the swollen feet, the slack jaw. It didn’t matter because she was immortal, or so we thought.

Nobody even remotely thought about mourning. Why? She had dictated everything in our lives, from clothing style to how many steps we needed to take daily. Dancing had been declared illegal years ago, and could be cause for incarceration or worse, but when we heard the news, all the steps and movements of shoulders and hips came back. We threw off our non-dancing skins and began to wave our hands to a new rhythm. Some of us had the brilliant idea of setting up disco lights in our living rooms and blasting music all night.

We had been so patient for too long, had been too complacent, too fearful. All of that was gone in a flash. Life was back and we were now about to explode. First, however, we had to find some champagne. Apparently that was the only thought possible for the entire population, because every bar throughout the country had had to close two hours after opening because they had run out of beer and other celebratory beverages. Ice cream freezers were cleaned out, food trucks made out like bandits, and honking horns woke up the remaining citizens who hadn’t realized what had happened yet.

A quick foray to a grocery store in town showed that the beer coolers were totally empty and signs taped to the glass door, “Sold out.” We’d have to go a couple of towns over to find some. We weren’t the only ones with that idea. Soon there were caravans of vehicles headed down I-95, so many of us, maybe all of us, were on a mission. We had credit cards and cash from the ATM to carry out our mission and get the party started. Or parties. Permanently joyful.

It was hard to organize all the events that people wanted to stage, hard to coordinate schedules so there wouldn’t be conflicts. Some organizers wanted to build effigies of the witch and burn them. Not in a single spot, but everywhere. In my small town alone there were nineteen (I counted them), each with its own platform. The figures were more than a little grotesque. We knew she’d been concealing hair loss, so some effigies were bald, others bore a toupee that had slipped. Some had rendered her more like a reptile with skin more leathery than a Komodo dragon’s. They didn’t skimp on the warts, nor did they hesitate to slap an adult diaper on the over-sized dolls or present her as a cross-dresser. (This was because of the way she had forbidden anything in human behavior that did not follow tradition - what she determined was tradition, properly religious, 1950s.)

We partied as if our lives depended on it, although they didn’t. We had just gotten them back and we could not control the feeling of freedom. We thought we’d do block parties with barbecues, or go swimming in the river. We felt ravenous and started cooking the best food of our lifetimes. Some of us painted immense murals on public buildings with words like “Down with…!” The government was ordered - by us - to remove all traces of the witch and in 48 hours all vestiges of her gold-caked residence surrounded by its moat of slime were all erased. Her enablers either jumped off cliffs or we sent them to countries where the leaders and everybody else hated us.

There’s so much more I could tell you, but these examples should suffice to show our joy, pure bliss, ecstasy. We had lost an evil witch whose life had virtually sucked us dry and made us want to sleep under our beds rather than in them. Now ir was time to take back our humanity, hope, jubilation, creativity, and above all, our kindness and sense of justice.

We were survivors and we deserved our new world. Not Oz with its fake ruler. Our world. Color, kisses, minds newly freed. A miracle.

Ding, dong!