TOTO RECALL
Essays, personal, peculiar and extraordinary by Kurt Mueller
Trade paperback: $15.00
D E S C R I P T I O N
Personal essayists—according to Aldous Huxley—are people who “write fragments of reflective autobiography and look at the world through the keyhole of anecdote and description.” What drives us to peek through a keyhole is curiosity. We have no idea what we’ll find. We have a sense of spying. We become privy to other worlds, but we can’t see everything, just what’s visible through a very small aperture. Even though there is much to discover, there is still a roomful of mystery left over. Though the subject matter varies widely, in toto these stories provide a keyhole view into what happens when we take a moment to step to the side of what’s going on around us long enough to realize that even the most ordinary experience often contains something extraordinary.
E X C E R P T
When it comes to The Wizard of Oz, it seems that there are those who love it and those who want to bury their head under a pillow and cry during its annual broadcast. I belong to the latter group...with about seven other people. Hating The Wizard of Oz is akin to hating apple pie or Santa Claus, and those who are vocal about it are tolerated about as much as a Wiccan before the Inquisition. The only difference is that Wiccans could conceivably recant their heresy. I have no choice. My loathing is visceral and instinctual. Unrecantable.
I remember the excitement in the house before my first viewing of the movie during the spring of 1964…or I think I do. I was only six years old and my peripheral memory was overwhelmed by the weird images that subsequently oozed out of our twelve-inch Philco black-and-white television set. Most likely popcorn was prepared, pillows and blankets were spread out on the floor and pajamas donned ahead of time. Though our mother set our entertainment expectations high, my instant reaction to the movie was dread, and that dread slowly grew into terror. Mom had told us how wonderful it was when the movie switched from black-and-white to vivid color after Dorothy landed over the rainbow. I could only imagine that special effect. Later in life I confirmed that the garish color palettes indeed did not make it less terrifying. I must have watched the whole movie that first time, because the hellish imagery was etched into my mind despite subsequent decades of trying to avoid it. It would have been the following year—when I was seven—that I would flee to my bedroom to bury my head under my pillow and cry while my family lost themselves in the psychotropic land of Oz in the next room.