Author: Jane Albright

A new podcast hosted by Oz fans Emily Kay Shrader and Tara Tagliaferro was one of the first to deliver an interview about To Oz! You can find Down the Yellow Brick Pod right here. It was a delight to share time with such enthusiastic Oz fans. And I appreciate the opportunity to rave on about all the great work so many people have done to create this weekend for the Oz community.

Scissors! Glue! Make your own Oz…. One of the more interesting step-by-step Oz crafts I’ve seen online is this delightful Tin Man project. Inspired by the Tin Woodman from Legends of Oz Dorothy’s Return, he could be just what you need to keep little hands busy. Now you can have a replica of that famous Kansas Farmhouse! This is a downloadable/printable .pdf file for a paper craft kit that you can print, cut out and build yourself. (use Card Cover or Cardstock) Price- $15.00 There’s not a website to give you a link, but you can email Robert Bruce @ [email protected] to order. If one house isn’t enough, here’s a Youtube link for an Emerald City project. Word to the wise; stock up on green glitter! Then surround it with poppies! There are many, many ways to make paper poppies, but friends recently followed this guide and recommend it. Lessons from Oz For those of you leading school work at home, here’s an extensive Wizard of Oz study guide. Oz history, vocabulary, the mechanics of a hot air balloon….  Lots to learn in Oz! Check it out. Everything Oz: The Wizard Book of Makes and Bakes has many projects suitable for children. To shop for it at an independent book store,  here’s a link to copies available through ABE.com. Weary of crafts? Other kids are learning yoga. Designed by Oz fans for children, why not follow the link and see how your kids like it?   Click the photo at right to see the video on Youtube. The Spirit of Oz characters have been reading Oz stories. You can find the Little Wizard Stories on Youtube.  And the Wizard of Oz Collectors United group on Facebook recently shared this crossword puzzle. Now I’m off to pull together a blog of Oz games — not old collectible ones, but new ones, readily available for family game nights. There are far more than I realized, like this one Emerald City Opoly.

If you think you’ve read all the Oz things there are to read, I suspect you need to see TheOzIndex.com. Our webmaster, board member, Ozmapolitan Express editor, Facebook administrator — he of many hats — Blair Frodelius created the Index as a database to gather all the Oz related publications he can find. And boy, has he ever found some. Packed with fiction and reference titles, browse around. You’ll find the original Oz books, newer fiction for both kids and adults, biographies, collecting books, literary analysis and “making of” books. You’re sure to find a book that appeals to you. I grabbed this photo of Blair off his chapter reading of The Wizard of Oz that you can find on our Youtube channel. He read Chapter 16 for us. Here’s a promo bit from when Anne Hathaway recorded the original story.  And here’s her entire reading at just under four hours. Nearly 79,000 people have tuned into Youtube to listen to her read The Wizard of Oz.  Perhaps The Magic of Oz, recently celebrated in the Baum Bugle would be a less familiar story? Libravox posted a recording of it here. You can find their entire list of Oz titles on their website. You can purchase recordings of all Baum’s Oz books, too. One site that sells them is audiobookstore.com. While most books not yet in the public domain, are not available as free audiobooks, I found Gregory Maguire reading his Wicked sequel, Son of a Witch on Youtube. Audio productions aren’t limited to books-on-tape (although you’ll find plenty of those).  The Colonial Radio Players have created “radio dramatizations” of the first six Oz books. From the modern new take on Oz, Hit the Bricks, (here’s a live table reading if you’d prefer) to the Lux Radio Theater hour-long version of The Wizard of Oz, starring Judy Garland, that was broadcast as a Christmas special in 1950, Youtube has multiple options. Some of my favorite other-than-book things you might enjoy online include the Wizard of Oz in Concert: Dreams Come True  Recorded in 1995 with an all-star cast, it’s a marvelous way to enjoy the MGM classic. For a much shorter version of the MGM Film, try the incomparable Bobby McFerrin in his one-man show of the beloved 1939 musical. You can add a version of this performance to your collection if you find the Disney CD “For Our Children, the concert” recorded in 1991 to benefit the Pediatric AIDS Foundation. Or, you can enjoy it online here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0jxxQGJOJ0 And if you’ve not seen Todrick Hall and Pentatonix, you can’t imagine what you’re missing.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rCQJmVaQpg&list=RD5rCQJmVaQpg&start_radio=1 More Todrick? Here’s the online version of his Straight Outta Oz production, that toured the US and Canada in 2016. This Oz production features all original musical written and produced by Hall. It uses the Wizard of Oz as a metaphor to share his own life story. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mUSwHhJ6zA That’s it for now, but its just the tip of the iceberg for the Oz you can find online with just a little sleuthing.

This Saturday, May 23, fans can experience a new kind of Oz event from the safety of home. Yaymaker Events invited film critic and Oz historian Ryan Jay to interview Oz celebrities in the first-ever virtual Oz convention. He soon assembled a star-studded cast to take fans behind the stage, screen, and page of some of his favorite Oz projects: Todrick Hall (Straight Outta Oz) Gregory Maguire (Author, Wicked) Danielle Paige (Author, Dorothy Must Die) Rob Paulsen (Voice of the Tin Man in Tom & Jerry The Wizard of Oz and Back to Oz) Emma Ridley (Ozma, Disney’s Return to Oz) Kari Wahlgren (Voice of Dorothy/Queen Ozma, Boomerang’s Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz) Shanice Williams (Dorothy, NBC’s The Wiz Live) Join the fun Saturday May 23 at 7 p.m. central daylight time for this live event. 100% of the $10 tickets benefit Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS with relief to those suffering from COVID-19. Tickets available now at https://bit.ly/35TRkCR Ryan, a life-long Oz fan, is well-known in the Oz community for his red-carpet and on-screen interviews with current Oz celebrities.  A member of the board of directors for the International Wizard of Oz Club and chairman of the Club’s Planning Committee, he began attending Oz conventions before he was old enough to drive. Today he presents and hosts Oz events around the country. 

Today I emailed our 2019 members a link to the Winter 2019 issue of The Baum Bugle online. We’ve never done anything like this before. We’ve never even emailed all our members before! But we are living in challenging times. No, we are not replacing the printed Bugle with a digital version, but we can’t anticipate when that printed copy will arrive in your mail. So off it went in a way that would have seemed like magic to L. Frank Baum. Email.  First, let me tell you about the Bugle!  This issue celebrates the publication centennial of L. Frank Baum’s The Magic of Oz. A cover story “Pyrzqxgl: or, How to Do Things with Magic Words” by Dennis Wilson Wise presents Baum’s unique word in the context of other magic words in classic literature. “The Believing Child” then puts that very word on the lips of a child in a fascinating story by Zenna Henderson. The Bugle re-publishes her story, with permission, for the first time since it appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in June 1970.  The magic continues with a report on a time Baum saw a famous magician perform at a meeting of the Uplifters. I contributed a bit about monuments of Magic Land, as Oz is known in Russia. The world’s best known magic shoes also get their due as Jonathan Shirshekan wraps up his two-part feature about Judy Garland’s famous Ruby Slippers.  Departments are packed with news and reviews. Speaking of which, Scott Cummings shares reviews that followed the original release of The Magic of Oz, and Brady Schwind dives into Dick Martin’s design of a new Magic of Oz dust jacket in 1960. Collectors can take a look at a few pieces of 1939 MGM merchandise that have led many collectors down a yellow brick road to collecting Oz merchandise. Cindy Ragni writes about the convention we’ve planned for August, and Zoe O’Haillin-Berne wraps up the issue talking about the Chesterton Wizard of Oz Days festival—planned to bring the long-popular festival back to Indiana. Which gets us back to these unpredictable days. The Bugle went to the printer in March. We expected you to have it by now. Our editor moved on to the Spring 2020 issue. Then the coronavirus crises led to the shutdown of our Chicago-area printer. They thought they’d reopen and get to it in April, then in May. Now? Well, they’re just not sure. Rather than leave our members entirely Bugle-less any longer we opted to share it digitally. We sent all members who’ve given us an email address a link to read it online. Members will get the printed one, too, of course. We just don’t know when. Similarly, Chesterton Wizard of Oz Days rescheduled from the May dates reported in the Bugle for July 11-12. Our August convention is still planned in Denslow’s old stomping grounds of the Roycroft campus in East Aurora, NY; we’ll decide in late May if that’s possible or if we need to reschedule it for next summer.  That’s the news for now. I hope you’ll appreciate seeing the Bugle online. When I first joined the Club back in the 1970s, an option like this was pure science fiction, and now here it is solving our dilemma as easily as clicking our heels. If you didn’t get an email from [email protected] with your link to the digital Bugle, write that address and let me know.  It may be that you are one of the 80 or so members we have who’ve never given us an email, or one of the 21 emails that bounced back as undeliverable.  I’m happy to work through whichever it to ensure you are included.

Today (March 20) the Oz Club rolls out a series of on-camera readings that take you through The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.  The chapter-a-day project can be found on the Oz Club’s Youtube channel and on our public Facebook page.  The idea was Dina Massachi’s, who is teaching from home during the coronavirus shutdown. When she posed it to me (at 6:20 am on Monday to be exact) I encouraged her to run with it. By Wednesday the first three recordings were in hand and it looked like Friday could really be our launch day. Watch along! You’ll see familiar faces. Lots of Oz Club people read chapters, but some Oz fans who are a bit more celebrated are reading, too.    During this time of crisis, all our schedules are upended as stress piles up on all sides. We at the Oz Club hope this project will give you one way to escape for a bit each day and find yourself in Oz.