dir2

that it needed salt.

“I used to have a neighbor just like her,” she said as we saw Miss Gulch seize Dorothy’s dog, Toto, having claimed that the dog bit her.

“Seriously, I think she even hated dogs that much.”

“Probably a cat person,” I replied.

“More like she hated all living things beside herself.”

I laughed. Someone behind us cleared their throat in that ‘be quiet, I’m trying to enjoy the picture’ way. I rolled my eyes.

Vair leaned closer and whispered, “No sound dampening. Makes the theater experience more realistic, remember?”

I composed a sentence in my mind and sent it to her. “Well, mister sensitive-hearing wouldn’t mind if we talked like this.”

“Never mind, we’ll rag on the Wicked Witch of 9A later,” she replied in the same way. “They couldn’t do this in the 1930’s anyway, so—”

The glitches reappeared, much worse than before, causing the fibers of the chairs to flash like the lightning of some distant cloud. Vair sunk into her chair and groaned. I gave her a kiss. “Don’t get in a lather, kitten. I’m sure this joint won’t give us the bum’s rush.”

She pointed to the screen. “Twister’s comin’, honey cooler. Better spill later.”

Dorothy’s family scrambled for shelter, and our ordinary farm girl ran through the rural landscape back to the farm to escape the tornado. The film felt so authentic yet otherworldly, as tornadoes had become as rare as the family farms that they once devastated; though the film was fiction, it still highlighted a once-real culture and invited us into the imagination of another time: the Land of Oz, the scarecrow, the tin man, and the cowardly lion. When the house fell, Dorothy walked out from a sepia past into a colorful future, one that might seem more real and more fantastic all at once, taking entire audiences along with her.

I was again yanked from the Land