Well, the wizard has come back to haunt me, thanks to the “children of confusion.”

“Courthouse” caught me meditating mischief on the front porch. She had just watched that venerable old classic for the very 23rd time and said, “‘PawPaw,’ have you ever seen the Wizard of Oz?”

I said to her, “Do you mean the movie, or the actual Wizard himself or the Panola Playhouse version?”
She said, “Well the movie of course, you couldn’t have seen the Wizard, silly.”

I said the movie was like all movies, a Hollywood revised version of the actual facts with the names and places changed to prevent lawsuits against the writer and producers. But anyway, tell me the story and I’ll tell you if they got it right.”

“Well,” she said, “there was a little girl named Dorothy Gail who lived on a farm in Kansas and a horrible storm blew her and her house and her puppy far away to the land of Oz where the house fell on the wicked witch too, and she got real mad cause the Munchies gave those shoes to Dorothy Gail and she couldn’t give ‘em back cause they was magic and didn’t like the witch any better than the Munchies.

“So Dorothy and some friends went to see the Wizard who was a crook and said he wouldn’t help them unless they killed the witch, who was trying to kill them. Well the old witch must have been mostly made of salt and food coloring (she was green, ya know) ‘cause when Dorothy doused her with a bucket of water she melted and she had to use the magic shoes to get back to Kansas. Course the old wizard was a big as a fraud as the Easter Bunny turned out to be.

I said, “As usual Hollywood got it all tangled up. In the first place Dorothy’s real name was Dorothy Jean Thibodaux and she lived in a house boat on a crowded ranch in a swamp off of highway 10. It was  a pretty poor place and a pretty poor swamp, too because there weren’t many crawdads in it! Just mostly mosquitoes and alligators which were protected (which didn’t make them any less hungry when she was out there creeping up on crawdad traps that caught more snakes and terrapins than crawdads).

“One afternoon after Uncle Henry had ran off with a can-can dancer and Auntie Em was boozing it up at “Sayers Gin Mill” and Dorothy was on her poor scrawny little knees and elbows feeling for tripwires to spring the traps, she said to no one in particular, ‘I just wish a big wind would just come and blow in somewhere else away from this damn mudhole of a life.’

“Someone must have been listening because soon as she returned to the houseboat Hurricane Jane (the 10th of the season) stormed in and swept the houseboat, dock and all, along with Dorothy Jean and a mixed-breed hound puppy that Uncle Henry used for an alligator bait sometimes, up in the atmosphere all the way to Red Banks, Miss. where  the house boat fell on the wicked witch of the east.

“The wicked witch of the east was not really a witch at all but a loan officer who’d come to repossess the Muncer Family farm on a mortgage default and had brought along her husband who was a lawyer (He was possibly the most wicked of all and that ol’ house boat mashed him flat as a frog, too, but he didn’t get mentioned.)

“Dorothy was dazed for a few days and could only remember her first name so the Muncers just called her Dorothy Gale after the storm that sent her.

“Now old Muncer was the tin man. People called him that because he had a weak heart and he sweated a lot and had arthritis and creaked and squeaked when he walked. Sometimes it got so bad he just froze up and had to be oiled with Vick’s salve and Ben-Gay lotion.

“Her other companion was Mr. Muncer’s hired man, Billy Lyons. Billy was a shaky sort of fellow, suffering from a disease called P.T.S.D. (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), he’d contacted while on vacation in Southeast Asia back in the distant past of the late 1960s and early 1970’s.

”They were going to see the Wizard, who was actually not a wizard but “child welfare officer” who collected children to work on the pea farm the county owned. And the witch wasn’t green she was red because Red Banks wasn’t just red banks, it was red mud and red dust and just about everything else was red too, so she really cared little one way or the other about those ole Ruby slippers. They wouldn’t fit her anyway cause she had flat feet.

“And the business about the broom was a crock too. She tooled around on a street sweeper she bought at a city auction in Memphis and souped it up so it would fly. It was pretty heavy so it wasn’t much for altitude but at least it didn’t blow all over the sky and make you air sick in a thunderstorm.

“She had just about had a belly full of Red Banks so she hatched up a plan. First she sent Lyons to the VA for a Xanax prescription to slow down the shakes, then to Powell’s Liquor store and flew Mr. Muncie to Baptist South for some blood thinner and arthritis medicine and bottle of nitro glycerin for his heart.

“Now as for Dorothy, she didn’t have any ambition at all about going back to that ol’ Louisiana cow pond, plus the houseboat was stuck in a cow pasture in Red Banks and getting redder by the minute and the dock had landed in Moon Lake at a place now called Doc’s Landing so they loaded up old Gator bait and magiced up the street sweeper and flew to the coast down at Diamondhead and opened a flight academy school for young ladies and beauty emporium and got rich and married and became good Republicans and had a lot of kids and lived Happily ever after.

“Also splashing around in the salt water leached all the red out of the witches skin except for one spot on her neck shaped like a map of the Southern Confederacy in 1863 and some of the doplets got on Dorothy Gale and freckled her up pretty good. So when you meet southern women with red necks or freckles you know where they come from.”

Courtney just looked disgusted and went to look for a turkey nest and I went to sleep on my old Army coat to dream about some more state history.

Lying around,

Ricky Harpole
(Contact Harpole at www.facebook.com/harpolive or www.colespointrecords.com)