As a native Californian who is most familiar with the east and west coasts, and as a huge fan of The Wizard Of Oz, Kansas has always symbolized middle America, the calm antithesis to New York energy or Californian trendiness. I’m old enough to remember when the movie was only shown on TV once a year, and when I was young enough to stay home to watch it, we only had a black and white television. So imagine my surprise when I saw it as part of a finals week movie marathon in college; when Dorothy emerged from the sepia-toned house to a fabulously colored Oz, at first I thought I’d picked up a contact high from all the pot smoke, but I digress.
At any rate, it is a bit of a head-scratcher to see that the mid-term campaigns in Kansas have become so erratic, and thus so fascinating to the rest of the country. There have actually been several news articles using the title I appropriated above! So I couldn’t resist getting in touch with my inner Dorothy (along with a costume left over from a corporate show I wrote, “The Wizard of HP”) to chime in…