I saw it for perhaps the hundredth time last night.

      I love the 1939 masterwork and nearly everything about it, from Ms. Garland's extraordinarily nuanced acting and voice with a range that had to be gifted her from Beyond, to the marvelous green-faced machinations of Ms. Hamilton's deliciously wretched Wicked Witch, to the sepia-toned B&W shooting of the Kansas countryside, to Mr. Lahr's so very, very over-the-top red-bow-maned, if not outright and proudly gay-iconic Brooklynesed Lion, to the torrent of political satire wrapped in the pompous, deleriously self-involved Wizard.

     The film defines the Latin sui generis. It is wholly Of Itself. Nothing about Ms. Garland's character or performance, nor of all the others', had theatrical antecedents, nor have they been remotely mimed thereafter.

     God Bless You, Ms. Garland, the writers, the composers, the lyricists, the directors, Munchkins, painters, stage-artists...for your genius

and your overarching message of  thoroughgoing acceptance of people for just who they are.

For that---and NOT the tired, sappy 1939 politically-correct pablum 'There's No Place Like Home'--is the

                                          real

                                                             and

                                                                           obvious

lasting message of Dorothy's Ever-Reigning Rainbow.

     And Yet.

     And yet I have to say I am wholly with the director John Waters ("Hairspray", etc.) who recalls seeing the film as a child in the Black-and-White '50s, wondering:

          Why In Hades Would Anyone Sane Want To Return To THAT Drab Kansas?

...to the colorlessness, to Aunt Em's plain smock dress, to the carnival barker's broken down covered-wagon...when she could have been 

crowned Queen of Oz?               

     Nonetheless, and to all who worked that magic and for All-Time: 

                       Bless You. Thank You.

          I choose, and you should, too, choose, to remain in Oz.