114 Lucky Peach “What is that little animal you are so tender of?” “He is my dog, Toto,” answered Dorothy. BY “Is he made of tin, or stuffed?” asked the Lion. Laurie “Neither. He’s a—a—a meat dog,” said the girl. Woolever ILLUSTRATIONS BY from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by l. frank baum JORDAN SPEER N 1979, THE VILLAGE OF CHITTENANGO, NEW YORK, organized its first event in honor of native son L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. That inaugural year there was an ice cream social and a short Oz-themed parade. Over time it became an annual festival with carnival rides and carnival food; eventually there was a longer parade and nonprofit status. And for a brief, shining period, there were genuine celebrity visitors in the form of geriatric actors who had portrayed Munchkins in the 1939 film. Yellow brick sidewalks were installed along Genesee Street, Chittenango’s main thoroughfare.

But as the parade grew, there commerce that signified a soft col- City Lanes that’s now a used-car lot. seemed to be an inverse relationship lapse of the middle-class fantasy: dol- Big manufacturing employers (Allied between the intensity of the town’s lar stores, Walmarts, pawnshops, vape Corporation, Carrier Corporation, Oz enthusiasm and the depressing shops, crisis pregnancy centers, weird General Electric, Remington Arms, Rust Belt realities shaping its citizens’ rootless churches, gold buyers. On the Oneida Limited) shrunk or departed lives the other 360-plus days of rural outskirts, meth labs cropped up altogether, and dairy farms became the year. and made themselves known via fiery housing tracts. Independently owned restau- explosions or incidences of domes- I know all this about Chittenango rants, bakeries, and retail stores in tic violence and assault. There was because I grew up there. As a child, I Chittenango’s once-thriving down- once a diner in Chittenango called attended the Oz parade, then marched town and those of neighboring towns Auntie Em’s Pantry that’s now a bar, in it in my Girl Scouts uniform or a were replaced by indiferent types of and a bowling alley called Emerald Munchkins costume (basically just

116 Lucky Peach pajamas and rain boots). At twelve, I n 1890, L. Frank Baum was a A McDonald’s had recently opened stalked the edges of the festival with newspaper publisher living in in Chittenango, and a man dressed two other girls, eating cotton candy South Dakota, where he wrote an as Ronald McDonald was handing out and crisp Hofmann hot dogs that the editorial in his Aberdeen Saturday Tootsie Rolls—the turds of the candy Knights of Columbus griddled, splat- Pioneer calling for the extermination universe—to children whose rain- tered in yellow mustard, and wrapped of the remaining Sioux Indians, just coats obscured their Oz-character in soft white split-top buns. We after Sitting Bull was killed. costumes. The Knights of Columbus walked up and down Genesee Street, “With his fall the nobility of the were there griddling dogs, while the rolling our eyes and snifng around Redskin is extinguished,” wrote Baum, Rotary Club served barbecued chicken after unknown excitements, and “and what few are left are a pack of and salt potatoes from their mobile wearing training bras and tank tops whining curs who lick the hand that chuck wagon. and so much surreptitiously applied smites them. The Whites, by law of It was a fun scene to be stoned in makeup that when my mother came conquest, by justice of civilization, are for a while, but the rain had begun, to pick me up in the late afternoon, masters of the American continent, and after about forty-five minutes, I she told me I looked like a hooker. and the best safety of the frontier figured we’d seen enough. We headed At age fifteen, I started bussing settlements will be secured by the back up toward the car; a band of bag- tables at one of those now-vanished total annihilation of the few remain- pipers wheezed up the street in the independent businesses, Kopp’s ing Indians. Why not annihilation? Their opposite direction. Canteen, where you could get broiled glory has fled, their spirit broken, their As we passed a blue and white house scallops or fried haddock or a French manhood efaced; better that they die along the parade route, I noticed a dip sandwich or the house specialty: than live the miserable wretches that middle-aged woman in a bathrobe and a plate of creamy, salty chicken they are.” a windbreaker standing on her front fricassee, with mashed potatoes and After reading Baum’s vitriolic porch, crying and holding open the a biscuit. Sutter Home was the house op-ed in a college sociology course, I screen door. We stopped to watch as a wine. A floor manager named Lynn, stopped telling people about the cute pair of young male EMTs carried out the tall and glamorous, taught me how to local tradition in the place where I freshly deceased, sheet-covered body safely move through the restaurant’s grew up, and I started writing a short of a Chittenango resident who’d had the three busy dining rooms with a loaded story about a teenage busgirl who bad timing to perish during the parade. tray on one shoulder, and how to clear smokes pot in a car with a boy while At the same time, the float carry- a table in less than thirty seconds. contemplating the racist roots of her ing six tiny elderly people in Oz cos- Half the staf were teenagers, the rest hometown’s most famous scion. tumes—living Munchkins!—rattled lifers. Every table got a relish tray When I was in my midtwenties, slowly by, pulled by a shiny green John with three-bean salad and a heavy still working on that story and seek- Deere tractor. Among them, wearing a amber glass ashtray. Every shift felt ing to shade in some details, I drove giant blue roll-brim hat and cape and like a party. up from Manhattan to Chittenango holding an umbrella, was Meinhardt There used to be three large for the festival and brought along a Raabe, who as the Munchkin Coroner grocery stores in Chittenango, but worldly friend to show her, with some had warbled memorably in the film, now there’s just one, Tops Friendly degree of defensive pride and shame, “She’s not only merely dead. She’s Market, which shares a building the small, strange place I came from, really most sincerely dead.” with Chittenango’s first casino. At and this biggest ball of twine we Also on the float was Jerry Maren, the newly constructed Yellow Brick called our own. welcoming member of the Lollipop Road Casino, gamblers can buy hot On that chilly, darkly overcast June Guild. After The Wizard of Oz, Maren dogs and hamburgers from Dorothy’s morning, my friend and I smoked a appeared in TV ads as both Mayor Farmhouse restaurant and get a beer joint in the car and then walked from McCheese and the Hamburglar, threw at Heart and Courage Saloon. the high school parking lot down to confetti at the end of every batshit- The Oneida Indian Nation, which Genesee Street to observe the parade crazy episode of The Gong Show, and owns both the strip mall and the from the yellow brick sidewalk. We played a mime who was strangled to casino, has been quietly not renewing enjoyed another town’s high school death by John Wayne Gacy in the other stores’ leases for years. They’re marching band and the spectacle of genre-busting film Dahmer vs. Gacy. in talks with Tops’s owners to add adolescent girls dancing an earnest, Between the corpse and the cold Oz-themed elements to the grocery frenetic routine inside a tractor-drawn rain and the farm equipment and the store when its lease is up. hay wagon. weed and Ronald McDonald, it felt

Fantasy 117 like we were in a David Lynch film. (Or silently, politely, through the spa- held in Chittenango, in concurrence maybe just a student film made by a ghetti dinner—a social staple of the with Oz-Stravaganza!. freshman with a Blue Velvet poster in region—given annually in his honor. “I like that everyone in Chittenango his dorm.) We bought a bag of rainbow- Jerry Maren is the only living Munch- is so amped on Oz, but it’s mainly colored candy corn and got the fuck kin, but at ninety-five years old, he’s MGM-y stuf,” said Fogarty, who had, out of there, laughing and shivering. justifiably retired from traveling. the previous day, joined the IWOC Later, I put the dead body in my short Ferris wheels and hot dogs and board of directors. “A lot of people story, and the Munchkins. little girls in blue-checked dresses here don’t even know about Baum’s are charming, but those Munchkin other books, but that’s fine, because ore than a decade actors had drawn big crowds of out- we’re here to teach them.” I spoke with passed before I returned of-towners to Chittenango, conferring him again a few weeks later. He told to Chittenango for relevance and an intoxicating me that he’d found the village “super Oz-Stravaganza!, as it is connection, however tenuous, to the adorable” but had also been called now known. The festival theme for celebrity-industrial complex. a faggot a few times that Saturday 2014 was “Timeless Oz,” and in some In 2014, to keep things interest- as he’d traversed Genesee Street in ways it fit: there were, as there had ing in the post-Munchkin era, there his short shorts. “I don’t know that always been, the Knights of Columbus was an attempt to break the Guinness me dressing up as Boy Dorothy in and the Rotary Club with their meats world record for the largest gathering Chittenango was the best idea,” he said. and sodas and salt potatoes; little kids of people dressed as Wizard of Oz char- “I was asked to take so many pictures in costumes and spastic adolescents acters. This would require 447 Wicked with little girls dressed as Dorothy. The in tank tops slurping soft-serve and Witches, Glindas, Scarecrows, Cowardly ladies love me, but the guys do not.” blue ices; local politicians and business Lions, Tin Men, and Dorothys—roughly He also mentioned having met Jerry owners waving to unimpressed parade 10 percent of the village population— Maren, dressed as Santa’s elf, at a observers from the backs of modest to stand together and be counted. toilet-recycling event in El Segundo. convertibles; the yellow brick sidewalk. That hot, sunny Saturday, the In the end, despite the presence of But time is of course relentless, high school football field was crisply the IWOC convention, the agreeable and some things were new and divided into rows that would accom- weather, and the fact that it was the diferent at Oz-Stravaganza!. For modate up to a thousand costumed seventy-fifth anniversary of the release instance, there was a tent featuring record-breakers. An ofcial videog- of the film, the Guinness world record a handful of authors and illustrators rapher, witnesses, and stewards—on stayed intact; at noon, the ofcial whose Oz-inspired work ofered hand to enforce Guinness’s strict rules recording time, only 247 Oz-costumed deeply dystopic and wacky outer- (costumes from the film only; no live individuals had gathered for a group space variations on the familiar story. animals; no high heels)—stood by photo before dispersing to take in the One comic-book artist had created a collecting the $5 entry fee, double- rest of the festival. Western-themed Oz series featuring checking numbered wristbands, count- Bob Baum, a great-grandson of L. a seventeen-year-old Dorothy—doe- ing and corralling participants on the Frank Baum who had come from Wood- eyed, with huge tits, a tiny waist, and a worryingly empty field. In Chittenango, land Hills, California, for the weekend, wardrobe of slutty cowgirl costumes. five dollars is not an insignificant sum, was among the dashed hopefuls leaving And there were now weekend- especially if you multiply it by a couple the field. I trotted after him and asked festival food-truck gypsies from who- of kids. The annual Oz costume contest, what he thought of the outcome. knows-where selling things like deep- supplanted this year by the world- “It’s a little disappointing,” said fried mac and cheese, Hawaiian shave record attempt, was usually free. Baum. He was dressed as the Wizard; ice, and $10 whoopie pies “stufed to Standing in line to buy a cup of his wife, Clare, wore a blue gingham the gills with flufy white filling.” The cofee from the school’s athletic Dorothy dress and a braided brown wig. Knights of Columbus had also added booster club, I spoke to Freddy “We kept hearing that there were going nachos and Sierra Mist to their menu. Fogarty, who was dressed as “Boy to be a lot more people, but for a first And the Munchkins were long Dorothy” in short blue gingham try I think it’s probably pretty good.” Six gone. When Munchkin Coroner Mein- overalls and white, plastic-framed days later, Chittenango’s eforts were hardt Raabe died in 2010, the Syra- sunglasses. He’d come to Chittenango dwarfed, and the world record was cuse paper ran a little feature about from El Segundo, California, to attend broken by 1,093 costumed celebrants him, in which it was revealed that he’d the International Wizard of Oz Club’s at an Oz festival in Grand Rapids, Min- never cared for pasta, and had sufered (IWOC) annual convention, also being nesota, Judy Garland’s hometown.

118 Lucky Peach