Anniversaries of all kinds

1939 was a big year.

I wasn't around, but as soon as I could read (probably even before) I knew that year brought major changes everywhere.

Just past: the 70th anniversary of the beginning of WWII. (For my family, that led to a move from B.C. to Saskatchewan, which led to an after-the-war move to Idaho, very likely the reason I'm in Seattle today. Not to mention some hairy war stories from my mother's cousins, who toughed it out in SE England.)

And then there's "The Wizard of Oz," which celebrates its 70th very soon.

I have never seen the movie. That probably puts me in the bottom 2% of the entire population of the planet.

Furthermore, I never took children to see the movie, which means I'm in the top 2% of bad mommies. (They have survived nicely, and I don't know to this day if they ever saw the movie - does that move me up to the top 1%?)

I read all the Oz books (some of them in those colorful early editions, enticingly shelved in a garret-like bedroom in a wonderful old cabin in Snoqualmie Pass.) And in about 1948 I was taken to see a stage version, at what was then Washington State College. (In the last scene, Dorothy disappeared off-stage on a wheeled dolly, after clicking her heels three times. It was, after all, a student production.)

My husband and his cousin, both serious Judy Garland fans, were aghast that I had missed this seminal experience. Reminding them that I grew up in a small town, where the movie may have shown up once then disappeared forever, didn't get me off the hook.

TV clips didn't help. Perhaps it was the closeups of Judy Garland, stuffed into a too-small gingham dress to disguise her budding adolescence.

Or the Munchkins. Even in a brief clip it was possible to cry and to cringe, all at the same time. Didn't anyone think, "exploitation?"

Perhaps I just didn't want to surrender the pictures in my mind to the ones on the screen.

This morning on NPR Scott Simon interviewed the president of the international fan club - and one of the last surviving actors, a 92-year old who played the Munchkin coroner.

He sounded like a wonderful person, and I'm glad he has survived to bask in the fame of the film.

But I still don't want to see it.