The 1903 WIZARD OF OZ and my Grammy Nomination!

I'm pleased to announce that the 2 CD set Vintage Recordings from the 1903 Broadway Musical The Wizard of Oz which I produced back in 2003 is now available again! You can order a copy by clicking here. I am very proud of this project and it earned me my Warholian fifteen minutes of fame as you'll see in the blog below.

When I was a kid, I often fantasized about being famous and winning awards. I do not mean the spelling bee, either! I was certain one day I’d have an Oscar, a Tony Award, or an Emmy Award. As I got a little older, PERHAPS I even fantasized about winning a Pulitzer or Nobel Prize! Yet I never even remotely imagined I would be nominated for a GRAMMY AWARD. Well, fate showed me!

Me at the 2003 GRAMMY Awards.

But wait, there’s a little back-story to fill in …

As some of you know, I have loved L. Frank Baum’s Oz books since I was in the second grade. I’ve worked in musical theatre and I have a passion for old recordings, really old recordings from the early 1900s. Then suddenly this almost forgotten Broadway musical of The Wizard of Oz entered my life. My three interests were all neatly tied together. 

Me and my 1905 Edison home cylinder player.

The Wizard of Oz is one of the best-loved fairy tales and one of the best-loved films of all time. Yet few people know that the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman attained fame in a hit Broadway musical in 1903.  The show was legendary for its success and its impact on American culture. It made Oz, Dorothy Gale, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodman household names.  

The show opened on Broadway at the Majestic Theater in New York on January 21, 1903. It toured, came back to New York, toured, and returned to New York again many times until finally disbanding around 1911. Stock and amateur companies continued to present it into the 1930s when it was overshadowed by the classic MGM film of The Wizard of Oz starring Judy Garland, which featured a new score.

To cut a long story short, I began a project to collect all of the ancient records I could find from the show, as well as photos, newspaper clippings, etc. In 2003 (a hundred years after the show originally opened!) I produced a 2 CD set of said recordings with two picture-filled booklets. I was very proud of my work on the project. 

A theater friend of mine, musical theatre orchestrator Larry Moore, said, “You must make sure this CD is submitted to the GRAMMY Awards.” I thought, “Yah, right . . .” But then another friend in New York said the same thing. And then my boyfriend started in on me! So I finally broke down and made sure the CD was submitted for consideration.

A month or so goes by, the GRAMMY nominations come out, and low and behold:

Nominated for “Best Historical Album”

Vintage Recordings from the 1903 Broadway Musical THE WIZARD OF OZ

Producer: David Maxine

I don’t remember literally “pinching myself,” but it was definitely one of those moments! So what happens when you’re nominated for a GRAMMY Award? Well, you start getting mail from the National Academy of  Recording Arts and Sciences, friends start congratulating you, and eventually you get to go to the GRAMMY Awards!

So I bought a tux. My BF rented a tux. And off we went! The night before the Awards were handed out, there was a “nominees reception" where we were given delightful things to eat and drink. They also presented the nominees with their GRAMMY Medallions! All of the nominees get them! It is a brass medal on a blue silk ribbon. It’s very spiffy! They also take our “official” GRAMMY portraits.

The bulk of the awards are given out in a “pre-telecast” ceremony. There are about 125 GRAMMYs given each year; and only about a dozen are presented on the air. My boyfriend’s parents came down for the awards, too. Mom-in-law was kind of excited to see several members of Chanticleer a few seats away.

Well, my category finally came up and, ala,s my GRAMMY went to “Martin Scorsese’s THE BLUES,” which I suspected it would. After my loss at the pre-show we headed over to the Staples Center in Los Angeles to attend the telecast part of the GRAMMYs. After the telecast we went to the big GRAMMY party at the Beverly Wilshire, ate lots, drank lots, picked up our “goody-bags,” and it was over.

I really do wish I’d won. I REALLY want one of those little phonograph-shaped awards! Some day!

Click here to order:

Vintage Recordings from the 1903 Broadway Musical THE WIZARD OF OZ

 

Homes of the Royal Historians

Eric and I were in the Pacific Northwest a few weeks ago and we spent a day or so of that time in Portland, Oregon. One thing I wanted to do was drive by the former home of Royal Historian, Eloise Jarvis McGraw (author of Merry Go Round in Oz, The Forbidden Fountain of Oz, and The Rundelstone of Oz.).

I had stayed in that house for several days when I visited Eloise back in the mid-1980s. You can read the blog about that visit, including several photos of the interior of the house, by clicking here. And even though Eloise is now gone I wanted to see the house again.

Home of Eloise Jarvis McGraw

The house, located at 1970 Indian Trail in Lake Oswego (a suburb of Portland) was much like I remembered it - though there did seem to be a few more neighbors. As I recall, Eloise and her husband William Corbin had designed and built the house in the late 1960s.

My return to Lake Oswego.

It was really nice seeing it again but it also made me a bit melancholy, remembering that wonderful visit, sad that Eloise is no longer with us.

Click here to read more about my visit to the house in the mid-1980s.

Getting Carded!

My birthday was a few days ago - and one of the nice things about having artistic friends is the occasional hand-created Ozzy birthday card. This year I got one from my friends, cartoonist Joe Phillips.

Joe has drawn other Ozzy things before, he's submitted art for the Winkie Con Program book and produced the incredible paper-sculpture of the Tin Woodman in the Winkie art show last year.

Anyway, Happy birthday to me!

Happy Holidays!

I suppose folks have noticed that I've been blogging a lot less than I used to. There are many reasons - I have been busier at work, I became irritated over a handful of obnoxious people who were leaving obnoxious comments on the blog (I deleted them), and I must admit I felt a little bit of blogger burn-out - a quite common disease! I sincerely hope to begin blogging more regularly again and will do my best to do so.

Today I am sharing an assortment of Ozzy news, but wanted to add a personal touch as the more personal blog posts have always been the more enjoyable to write. As I mentioned in an earlier post, my first exposure to Oz was my watching the MGM film on our black-and-white television when I was four years old. I enjoyed it a lot, but it certainly didn't turn me into a mega-Oz fan. However, not long after seeing the film, my mom and I were walking through the Lobo Bookstore near the University of New Mexico campus, and on an end-cap I saw a copy of The Wizard of Oz - the edition pictured below.

I don't remember if I saw the cover and knew what it was or whether my mom pointed it out. In any case, we bought it and I think it was read to me. However, the main thing I remember was how much the cover illustration fascinated me. I'm still not sure why. Perhaps it was because the characters looked quite different from the way they did in the MGM film? I think it was partly the heavy blue/green tonality of the image. I don't know what happened to the original copy of the book we bought, but when I found this copy about fifteen years ago, I saw the cover illustration and instantly was taken back to being four years old. It was quite a powerful sensation!

The book has proved quite interesting to examine with my adult eyes. The book was published by Avon Books, and this copy says "First Camelot Printing, November 1967." I suspect I encountered the book right after it came out. The interior is an unabridged Wizard text featuring all of the illustrations from the early 1960s Reilly & Lee "white edition." The little book even has a collage of Denslow images printed on the inside covers and fly-leaves, creating an "endpaper" effect. I am sure, in retrospect, that one thing that drew me to want the book when I was little was the fact that it was profusely illustrated. 

So this was my first ever Oz book. I wasn't really hooked until my second grade teacher started reading us the later Baum Oz titles, but I'm really happy to have found a copy of the first Oz book I ever remember seeing or owning.

OK, now that I have made you read this far, I will toss a few bits of Ozzy news into the blog. First, we have posted our December Tiger Tale on the website and I hope you'll take a moment to check it out. It is L. Frank Baum's short story "Aunt 'Phroney's Boy," first published exactly a hundred years ago in the December 1912 issue of St. Nicholas Magazine.

I am also pleased to announce that a new issue of Eric Shanower's Age of Bronze has just been published. Copies can be ordered from our website or found in your local comic book store. Click here to order.

That's about it for today - I'll do my best to not make you wait too long for another blog post.

Happy Holidays!

WInkie Con on EMERALD CITY RADIO!

This week on Emerald City Radio roving reporter Number Nine conducts an in-depth interview with me about my work as Programming Director of the Winkie Convention. The fifteen minute interview plays twice daily. So come give a listen as I tell the tale of how I first went to Winkies when I was fourteen and what I have in store for attendees this year!

It's easy to listen to Emerald City Radio on Live365. Just click here to go to Live365 and click "Sign Up" in the upper right hand corner and join for free for access to thousands of internet radio stations. Then "Log In" and make a search for Emerald City Radio. When the Emerald City Radio logo shows up in your search results, just click on the logo to start listening right away! Listening is free.

So come on and give Emerald City Radio a try. Our current playlist is over 12 hours long with such a wide variety of Oz songs and music that you're sure to hear some old friends and some new delights.

Emerald City Radio - all great, all powerful - all the time! 

I Was a Pre-teen Margolotte

You may may be wondering why I'm sharing a photo of myself at nine years old playing with Cookie Monster and Oscar the Grouch. It has nothing to do with my fondness for vintage SESAME STREET toys, but everything to do with the patchwork coat I am wearing.

I don't recall where that little patchwork coat came from, but I do remember I immediately thought of the Patchwork Girl when first I saw it. I had nearly outgrown it in this photo. My sister wore it sometimes; she was five years younger than I was, but big for her age. Anyway, about a year after this photo was taken I got it in my head to make a Patchwork Girl out of it.

My mom took me to a fabric store and - wonder of wonders - they even had some patchwork-printed fabric! We bought several yards, I chose a pair of buttons for eyes, a yellow pom-pom for a nose, and some brown embroidery thread for her hair.

To make the body I spread a double layer of the patchwork fabric on the floor and had my sister lay down on it. I then traced my five-year-old sister and cut out the shape. When my dad came home from work I asked him to sew the basic seam around the edges, which he did. (Mom wouldn't have been caught dead near a sewing machine!) After Scraps was sewn I stuffed her with shredded foam rubber.

I sewed the head myself - by hand. I didn't really grasp the concept of research and failed to reread the description of Scraps in the book. So she ended up with blue eyes and the pom-pom nose. I had remembered her nose was yellow. I gave her some tan cotton gloves (now lost), and she wore socks and a pair of my grandmother's high-heels at first (they are now long-lost, too).

Over the years she wore out some. I think my mom's last dog got ahold of her, too. In any case her head ripped, foam bits started to fall out, and she's been a mess for a long time now. I finally decided she needed some basic refurbishment. I bought some poly-fil batting a few days ago, came home, took off her coat, and began the overhaul.

Because of the way I made her there was no easy way to get to the foam, so I made a neat incision in her back and pulled out all the foam rubber and restuffed her with the poly-fil batting. I must add that I get very sentimental over some stuff and it is really hard to throw the old foam rubber away. I stuffed it all in her when I was ten! Yet it's aging badly and if she was going to survive she needed a more stable stuffing. I still have to make some repairs to her dress, too.

When it came time to repair her head I pulled out the foam bits and inside her head I found a big hard wad of cotton balls. I had totally forgotten I had put them in her head. It was an un-researched attempt at giving her brains. I repaired a big rip around her mouth and decided she was restored enough. I had sewn pearls in her mouth for teeth when I was ten - but they eventually fell out and I've chosen to keep my restoration efforts to a minimum - limiting myself to preservation - not restoration. I will probably try to find a pair of kid-sized white cotton gloves for her hands, though.

A couple years after I made this Scraps I made an eight-inch-tall version to go with my Mego Wizard of Oz toys. That one is long gone. I'm glad I still have the big one - but I wish the cat didn't look at her so longingly!

Life as an Oz Boy

Back in the early-mid 1980s I was just starting to have an Oz collection that I was semi-proud of. I was also a bit of a closet-case, with zero social life and I had pretty much gone to live in Oz.  

Sigh . . .

Anyway, one of the ways I felt comfortable reaching out of my little oblong fairyland was by showing off my Ozzy treasures to anyone who cared to look at them. Sometimes this meant dragging house guests into the so-called  "Oz museum," but I also used the collection as a social crutch of sorts by hosting the occasional Oz party or offering to show my collection at local libraries and things.

I recently found a little stash of photos from one of the better library displays I set up. These are from a display at the Golden Valley Public Library in Minneapolis - part of the Minneapolis Public Library System. I must say that I think my collection wasn't so shabby, considering I was only nineteen years old.

I had all forty Oz books by this time and several fairly nice first editions. The Hill Wizard above is a little beat-up and is a second-state copy, but I'd gotten it at my first Winkie Convention when I was fourteen for $56, so who's complaining? The seemingly very nice copy of Ozma of Oz was great for displays - sadly there is a bullet hole right through the middle of all the pages. I guess someone set the book up on a fence - covers open - and used it for target practice. The copy of Little Wizard Stories of Oz was one of the few ultra-bargains I ever found. I got it from a local woman for fifteen bucks at a book show.

My first edition copies of Emerald City and Marvelous Land were a bit on the shabby side.

I liked mixing up the displays with a little of everything. So we get a copy of Patchwork Girl, my playing pieces for the 1921 Parker Brothers Oz game, and a miniature version I had made of the game.

I found Dick Martin's Cut-and-Assemble the Emerald City great for displays. The little buildings could always fill a dull niche. The original drawing from Forbidden Fountain of Oz was a gift from Dick Martin at my first Ozmapolitan Con.

Another mixed shelf of Oz stuff. The blue thing is a yo-yo from the Banner Elk Land of Oz theme park.

From my mid-teen years I had a strong interest in foreign editions - at last count I had about three hundred and fifty. The hard-to-see map in the background is also from the Banner Elk theme park, which I'd visited when I was thirteen.

I made the little Oz flag when I was fourteen. You can read a blog about it by clicking here, if you like. I always found pop-up books worked well in displays, too. The paper Gump (another present from Dick Martin) is a favorite, though I don't have him set up anywhere at the moment. He lives flat these days.

So here I sit - decades later - and Oz still plays a huge part in my social life. 

Sigh ...

Moebius 1938 - 2012

French edition of ELSEWHERE PRINCE

The comics world has suffered another important loss with the death of French cartoonist Jean Giraud - better known to most Americans as Moebius. Best known in the United States for his Western series Blueberry, Arzach, The Airtight Garage, and work on such films as Alien, Tron, Willow, and The Fifth Element. You can learn a bit more about his long and fascinating career by clicking here.

In the late 1980s Eric Shanower worked with Moebius on a six-issue comics series called The Elsewhere Prince, published in the US by Epic/Marvel. It was published simultaneously in France by Les Humanoides. Moebius had written the plot/storyline, the dialogue was written by Randy and Jean-Marc Lofficier, and Eric drew it.

In 1989 Eric and I went to Europe for the first time and while we were in France we took the opportunity to visit Moebius in his apartment in Paris. It was a very pleasant afternoon.

Eric Shanower and Moebius (1989)

I have a small association with Moebius myself. When I was editing Oz-story I had the nerve to ask him for a cover drawing. He supplied a pen-and ink drawing of a young man gazing at a huge gemstone. It was suggested that it could be an emerald (as in the Emerald City), and I knew at once that this would give me the Ozzy Moebius cover I had wanted. Moebius was not free to paint the sketch so the task fell on me - making the cover of Oz-story No. 3 a Moebius/Maxine collaboration.

So long, Jean.

Detours on the Yellow Brick Road

One thing I most like about both Eric's and my Oz collections is that each have many little sub-collections - detours down forks on the yellow brick road that most Oz collectors have never traveled down.

One such Ozzy detour is our interest in Rachel Cosgrove Payes's non-Oz writing. While Oz fans know her for her two Oz books, The Hidden Valley of Oz (1951) and The Wicked Witch of Oz (1993), she also wrote over forty other novels and a lot of short fiction.

While I'm not particularly interested in the Gothic Romance novels she wrote in her latter years, I do have a fondness for her Science Fiction novels (published under the psuedonym E. L. Arch), her Mystery novels, and a small handful of her YA "Career" novels, many of which are quite enjoyable.

Another strong side-road in my Oz collection is foreign editions of the Oz books - I probably have about three hundred at this point, dating from the early 1930s on up to brand-new in 2012.

Today I got a new item that fits in both side-collections - a German edition of Rachel Cosgrove's Bridge to Yesterday, an SF novel first published by Avalon in 1963.  I had expected a regular paperback book to arrive, but this German edition, titled Verlorene Vergangenheit (The Lost Past), was published in 1964 in a dime-novel series called Utopia - a series devoted to Zukunftsroman (future stories). It's very thin, stapled at the spine, with the text printed in two columns on newsprint - it feels like a slightly undersized old-fashioned comic book.

I like the German cover much better than the American cover. The scene depicted is when Leo Tenney and a man he's been chasing run smack into the Minotaur (a bull, anyway) in the Labyrinth at a sort of futuristic theme park which reminded me of Michael Crichton's Westworld - though Cosgrove's theme park predates Crichton's by a decade.

One odd thing in the German edition is a list of the main characters and who they are in the story - well, it gives away a huge amount of the plot, so if you're planning on reading Bridge to Yesterday in German, here's a major spoiler alert! There is a short bonus story at the end of the volume, The Celestial Blueprint by Philip José Farmer.

You can read more about the American edition of Bridge to Yesterday in this previous blog post.

So, dear readers, do you have any odd little detours in YOUR Oz collections?

The Apocryphal Oziad

Many long-time attendees of the Winkie Convention will recall Fred Otto's Oziad. Over three decades Fred (seen at left) would transform each of the forty Oz books into rollicking verse - in rhyme! Sometimes incredibly clever, sometimes cringingly atrocious. The Oziad was a tradition at the Winkie Convention.

In 1991 Eric Shanower and I chaired our first Winkie Convention. The theme was "Oz on Stage," and Eric and I produced a very elaborate convention. The displays, the program book, and pretty much everything else was organized around the "Oz on Stage" theme and Eric and I wrote Fred Otto to ask if he'd consider doing the 1991 Oziad on one of Baum's stage shows or on Baum's stage works in general.

Alas, Fred said no. But he said no in the nicest possible way.

Dear David and Eric,

I don't have the books for the tales of Baum's stage works,
Those plays are to me esoteric.
Each new plan proposed an old man of my age irks.
Though it be for David and Eric.

The challenge of rhyming the name Tryxie Tryfle
Or that of the cow, Imogene,
Will please me as anything else in my life'll
But I'm not a rhyming machine!

So, with your approval, I'll do Hidden Valley.
I've read it before, so don't fret.
I did it last year at the Munchkins' gay rally,
In front of the authoress yet!

See you at Asilomar,
Fred

Fred is gone now. But he and The Oziad are still fondly remembered at the Winkie Convention.

If you'd like to join us at this year's Winkie Convention check out the WINKIE CON tab at the top of this page or click here. We'd be delighted to have you join us.

Fred Otto reading THE OZIAD at the 1978 Winkie Convention

Newsies in Oz!

Back in the very early 1980s three teenage boys went to Oz. . . . Well, they each started Oz newsletters, anyway.

Eric Gjovaag - David Maxine - Scott Cummings (circa early 1980s)

In those days the Oz Club's journal, The Baum Bugle, was being published very sporadically, yet the Oz Club was heading into its biggest decade. Oz fans were simply itching for contact with each other, to learn of local Oz news and activities.

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The Seattle area was especially rich with Oz interest and club members, and the local group had begun holding a regular mini-Oz convention called The Oogaboo Rendezvous.

The group was becoming so active that Eric Gjovaag was the first to address the need for a regional Oz newsletter. In January 1980 he produced the first issue of The Oogaboo Review. The newsletter was published quarterly.

In addition to local news, Eric filled the issue with book reviews, mini-essays, short fiction, profiles of local Oz folk, and of course announcements and reports on the Oogaboo Rendezvous.

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In 1981 my family had just recently moved to Minneapolis and there was a large Oz community waiting to be organized. I started hosting local Oz parties, showing my collection at local libraries, and Fred Meyer mentioned The Oogaboo Review to me. I was immediately smitten with the idea of starting my own newsletter and in the Spring of 1981 I produced the first issue of The Pumperdink Press.

Like Eric's Seattle newsletter, The Pumperdink Press included a good deal more than local Oz news. I shared new treasures from my collection,  reviewed books and movies, and was pleased to include some really neat things, including Oz fiction by Philip José Farmer and previously unpublished artwork by W. W. Denslow, Dick Martin, and Eloise Jarvis McGraw. Each issue also contained an advice and gossip column written by Kabumpo, the Elegant Elephant.

The Pumperdink Press was published for three years. I  tried to make each issue more elaborate than the last, absorbing new layout techniques, printing on colored paper, exploring dry-transfer lettering and decorative layout tape, and having photographs screened. By the third issue I had switched from photocopying to off-set printing. All these regional newsletters were typed on typewriters. Affordable home computers and laser printers were still several years away.

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At exactly the same time, Scott Cummings of upstate New York began The Munchkin Monthly. Yes, a monthly! Though in actuality it was only supposed to be published ten times per year, the daunting schedule forced the closure of the paper after only six issues. It was soon reborn as a quarterly called The Munchkin Times.

Scott was the youngest of the three of us - his youthful enthusiasm was evident in his taking the time to hand decorate many of the issues (note the Ozmite wings under the masthead), and Scott would send personal notes and valentines. I even have a Munchkin Times pendant Scott made with Shrinky Dinks!

I don't know if Scott did this for everyone, but some of my envelopes came very elaborately decorated.

If memory serves me right, all three newsletters ceased publication sometime in 1985. I completed three volumes (twelve issues) of The Pumperdink Press. The final four issues were spread over almost two years. My first full-time theatre job was sapping all my creative energy. Eric Gjovaag eventually turned the reins of The Oogaboo Review over to his Assistant Editor, Glenn Ingersoll, after volume five, and Glenn produced another couple issues. The last partial issue I have of The Munchkin Times dates from August 1985 and I think that was the final one.

What I find most interesting is that we Oz boys were about the same age, each of us built our little Oz journals at about the same time, and each journal ended as our lives became too "grown up" for us to manage the headaches of editorship. Yet we each also went on to fairly high-profile lives in the Oz community. Eric Gjovaag developed the earliest (and best) major website devoted to L. Frank Baum and Oz; I went on to found Hungry Tiger Press and edit Oz-story Magazine (not to mention this time-sap of a blog); and Scott Cummings is currently the editor of The Baum Bugle - one of the best Bugle editors that journal has had.

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I can't finish this blog without mentioning one other Ozzy newsletter, The Quadling Quarterly. It was founded by a young kid named John Plummer from Tennessee. He prepared three or four issues and disappeared. Maybe he'll read this blog and say hello! [Note: Just reconnected with John Plummer on Facebook!]

The 1970s and early 1980s produced a very large and very engaged group of young Oz fans. I wish I saw more of that happening today. Kids, teenagers, and families seem to be disappearing from organized Oz life. I know kids still love Oz, but although I've seen a special few, I haven't seen a whole new generation of Ozzies chomping at the bit since the early 1990s - certainly not in the Oz Club anyway - but here's hoping!

Eric Gjovaag - David Maxine - Scott Cummings  -  (these days)

We're Off to Blog the Wizard!

I'm delighted to announce that I am a guest blogger today on The New York Public Library's "Musical of the Month" series discussing the 1903 Wizard of Oz musical.

An initial post yesterday by blogger and NYPL Digital Curator Doug Reside included a digital version of Baum's 1903 copyright deposit script.

Many of you probably know I've been quite fascinated with this particular show for the last decade or so and am working to finish my long overdue book on the show. I've also produced the award-winning 2 CD set Vintage Recordings from the 1903 Broadway Musical The Wizard Of Oz which earned Grammy nomination as "Best Historical Album" of 2003.

Anyway, go on over and read my guest blogging antics on the NYPL site by clicking here.

http://www.nypl.org/blog/2011/12/15/musical-month-production-history-1903-oz

Happy Birthday, Rachel Cosgrove!

Today, December 11, 2011, would have been Rachel Cosgrove Payes's 89th birthday.

In the summer of 1979 I finally obtained a copy of her first book The Hidden Valley of Oz (not a first edition) and after reading it I wanted to write Rachel Cosgrove and get my book signed. I wrote Fred Meyer, then secretary of the Oz Club, for her address, but he warned me she'd probably not answer as she hated Oz and hated Oz fans. But he sent me her address and I decided to try my luck.

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I got an immediate reply from Rachel and she couldn't have been more charming. She even doodled little pictures of her characters Percy and Spots from Hidden Valley at the bottom of the letter. She happily agreed to autograph my book and signed the letter "Oz forever!"

It turns out she didn't dislike Oz or dislike Oz fans - she disliked Fred Meyer. When the Oz Club was founded in the late 1950s Fred had written to Rachel asking if she'd like to join. She politely declined for various reasons, including having two young children to raise. But Fred kept badgering her - and he really kept badgering her to send him a copy of her then-unpublished second Oz book, The Wicked Witch of Oz. She finally had to read him the riot act - asking him to leave her alone - something that I'm sure she could do quite well! And Fred wrote her off as an Oz hater.

Now, Rachel did indeed have a problem understanding grown men devoting their lives to Oz. She repeatedly said, "Oz is for kids." Rachel also had great trouble comprehending what she called "the collector mentality." But to some extent these were just sound bytes Rachel would toss out. Anyone who makes herself a Wicked Witch of the South costume (pointy hat included) and delights in showing off her silver high heels (as silver slippers) must have a big streak of Ozzy fandom running through her veins. 

So back to that first letter from 1979. I sent Rachel my copy of Hidden Valley and she signed it. We struck up a pen-pal sort of correspondence, exchanging a couple letters a year and birthday and Christmas cards. In early 1985 I was going to be in New York State and I wrote and asked if I might pay her a visit. She said she'd be delighted. Rachel was living in Shrub Oak, New York, about half an hour north of NYC. She welcomed me in, we talked for a bit, she showed me the shelves that held copies of all of her books (almost forty titles at that time), and we also looked at her research library which she used in writing the gothic romance novels she wrote in her latter years.

Rachel Cosgrove Payes in her living room, January 1985.

The most surprising thing about the visit was finding Rachel had a bad foot. She had fought a serious battle with cancer a couple decades before, and the experimental chemo that saved her life dissolved some bones in her foot. She got around fine, and her foot never stopped her from doing extensive world travel or going dancing with her husband Norman. I had acquired a first edition of Hidden Valley by this time and I brought it along, hoping she would sign it. She happily agreed to do so.

We continued to exchange notes on occasion - especially after I started attending NYU. But in the summer of 1990 our relationship kicked into higher gear. Eric Shanower and I had just started living together and suddenly Eric was asked by the Oz Club to illustrate Rachel's Wicked Witch of Oz. The Oz Club had just gotten the rights to reprint Hidden Valley of Oz, too. Rachel decided to attend the Munchkin Convention that year and her Ozzy renaissance began. She and Eric wrote back and forth quite a bit while he was illustrating the book, Rachel became a regular at the Munchkin Convention, and in 1994 I asked her to write something Ozzy for the first issue of my forthcoming anthology Oz-story. A few months later a long short story arrived in the mail, "Percy and the Shrinking Violet."

Eric, Rachel, and David at the OZ-STORY No. 1 Publication Party - June 1995

She wrote me another story, "Spots in Oz," for Oz-story No. 3. She and Norman had become good friends. Eric and I held publication parties for each issue of Oz-story and Rachel and Norman always came. Rachel often brought little hand-made gifts and bottles of wine, she baked Hidden Valley muffins for us, she went to a lot of trouble to track down a refrigerator magnet set she thought Eric and I needed - it was a Michelangelo Statue of David magnet complete with removable Santa suit! It's on our current refrigerator still. Every few weeks Eric and I would get a letter (sometimes addressed to our dog) and Rachel would have scribbled some complaint about writing, clipped a cartoon, and thrown in some coupons for something she thought we might need. Rachel was no longer the Royal Historian of Oz - she'd just become a good friend.

Happy Birthday, Rachel.

Soup! Soup! Soup!

I've been cleaning house and sorting boxes of Oz crap and recently ran across a drawing I did for Eric a very long time ago, back when he was editing the Oz Calendar.

In previous years I had done several drawings for the Oz Calendar and I'd not been terribly happy with any of them. I don't like drawing line art all that much, but I do like painting, and Eric suggested I try painting a calendar picture instead of working in pen-and-ink line art. So I did. The theme was to be "The Villains of Oz," as I recall. I was quite pleased with my picture - a silly drawing of the Roly-Rogues from Baum's Queen Zixi of Ix (1905). After I'd finished the drawing the "Villains" calendar theme was abandoned and the drawing was never published.

But the Roly-Rogues were getting hungry after all these years, so I've let them loose on the blog.

Picnic with the Royal Historian

Eloise McGraw and David Maxine - Mount Hood.

I recently ran across a little stash of photos that has prompted me to continue the blog-story I began last December about my friendship with Eloise Jarvis McGraw (author of Merry Go Round in Oz, The Forbidden Fountain of Oz, and The Rundelstone of Oz.) You can read part one by clicking here.

I returned home from the 1983 Winkie Con, determined to change my life. I had always loved the theatre and while I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do, I started taking acting classes at the Guthrie Theatre's outreach program. Within a few months I was working there, first as a stage management intern, then as Production Assistant and stagehand. By the next summer I felt I had my life by the tail and could hardly wait for the 1984 Winkie Con. Eloise had invited me to fly to Portland, Oregon, and stay with her and her husband Bill for several days before the convention, and then the three of us would drive down the west coast to Winkies, which was being held for the first time at Asilomar.

Eloise and Bill (who also wrote children’s books under the name of William Corbin) picked me up at the airport and drove me to their home in Lake Oswego. After being shown the guestroom I was to occupy, Eloise gave me a tour of the house, which she and her husband had designed. It was a multi-level home, lots of wood and glass, very inviting.

Bill McGraw (William Corbin) on the deck of his Lake Oswego home.

She shared a writing room/library with her husband. One wall was lined with books: books they had written, reference works, and other children’s books. Near the big window at the end of the room were two facing desks (or was it a partner’s desk?). In any case, it was clear they worked easily in close proximity. One thing Eloise showed me was her computer, one of the first home computers I’d seen close up. Eloise had switched from her Selectric typewriter to the word processor a year or so before. She loved it! I was quite impressed that a woman of almost seventy had made the shift to this new technology so easily and happily.

Eloise critiquing a manuscript for a course she was teaching.

That night Eloise cooked dinner - she showed me all of the neat little bits of architecture she had worked into her kitchen. Eloise was not very tall, and I recall that she had designed the kick-boards under the kitchen counter-tops to pull out as a sort of "stepping-stool" so she could knead bread and do food prep more comfortably - she was a gourmet cook. Alas, I don’t recall what we ate that night, but she had baked a loaf of French bread and she took me down into the wine cellar to help her pick a bottle of wine. The McGraw wine cellar was built into a natural cleft in the rock that the house sat upon, cooled by the earth, a true wine cave. I joked that it looked like her own private entrance to the Nome Kingdom, which she thought very funny.

Eloise working on a multi-block Oz print.

Eloise was an artist and print-maker. The lowest floor of the house was her art studio. She was preparing what would be her only Oz print as a donation to the Winkie Convention auction. She had a little work left to do on it and she showed me how all the various print blocks worked, the different colors, etc. She had a big stack of proofs and samples and little sketches for the Ozzy print. She was planning to throw out these preliminary materials - I volunteered to take them home with me and still have them

The print was a design for a coat-of-arms for Bzz-antium, a kingdom of bees featured in an Oz manuscript Eloise was writing at the time. That manuscript was never published.

I especially enjoyed breakfast at the McGraws. There was a sort of breakfast nook, very sunny, and we just had coffee, juice, and a couple slices of Eloise’s homemade bread, which we toasted. Eloise had me try some very nice marmalade she had brought home from England. It was the first time I’d ever liked marmalade.

Self-portrait by Lauren Lynn McGraw in the breakfast nook.

Hanging on the wall in the breakfast nook was a very large watercolor self-portrait of Eloise’s daughter, Lynn McGraw, co-author of Merry Go Round in Oz and The Forbidden Fountain of Oz.

At one point I asked Eloise if she still had her childhood Oz books. She took me upstairs to look at them. They mostly dated from the 1920s when she had received them as a child. A few more were acquired for her own kids, Lynn and Peter. As we looked through them she decided she ought to give one to the Winkie Auction - I think she asked my advice. She settled on parting with a first edition of Scalawagons of Oz, a book that had crept into the collection via a cousin when Lynn had been a child. That copy of Scalawagons played an important part in Oz book history, but I’ll save that story for another blog. (Click here to read)

My last full day in Lake Oswego was the Fourth of July. Eloise proposed we drive up Mount Hood and have a picnic. She packed a grand lunch and we spent the day on the mountain. That evening, after we got back to Portland, we all went over to Lynn McGraw’s house. I think Eloise and Bill dropped me off and I visited with Lynn for the evening. She showed me her paintings (she is an artist) and I bought two watercolor studies. Then Lynn and Willie (her partner at the time) and I had a light picnic dinner and watched the fireworks.

Lynn drove me back to Lake Oswego. When I went in I found Eloise had already put on her pink flannel nightgown. I was struck by the informality of it, how comfortable Eloise had become having me around. We stayed up and talked for a bit and listened to James Galway playing in a Fourth of July concert. The next morning we began our drive down to the Winkie Convention.

For the most part I’ve been relating all the stories and anecdotes that relate to Eloise. What isn’t included here is the interest she took in what I was doing with my life: the acting classes, my job at the theatre, my story writing. My visit with the Royal Historian turned into more of a visit with a new grandmother.

Eloise McGraw and David Maxine - Picnic on Mount Hood.

Sad Little Oz Boy

My parents divorced in the summer of 1977, and within a few weeks of that, our house burned down. The family badly needed an escape. So my mom and sister and I went to the Winkie Convention in Yosemite, California. It was a life-changing experience.

I returned home full of courage and very Ozzed up. My childhood love of Oz shifted into high-gear. I began to eat, sleep, and breathe Oz - whether it was pleading for an advance on my allowance to buy a another first edition or requesting an Oz map on my birthday cake. And it wasn't enough to buy every Oz book in sight and turn my bedroom into the Royal Oz Museum of Greater Albuquerque, I wanted the entire family to be Ozzy. I suggested to Mom we needed a custom license plate for our car. For some reason mom agreed.

As you can see, I picked my favorite character's name. But also because I knew the custom plates in New Mexico were blue and of course were rectangle-shaped. The day it arrived I rushed out to the car to bolt it on. It got a lot of attention! People would honk and wave, they'd also give our car a wide berth. It took several weeks for us to realize that "Woozy" had a very different meaning to the average schmo on the streets of Albuquerque than it did to me (and my Ozzy family). But the car remained Woozy until we sold it several years later.

In 1978 we returned to the Winkie Convention with our Woozy mobile. And to make it even Ozzier, I made an Oz flag to go on the radio antenna. It came out exactly as I'd wanted except that I didn't know how to embroider an "Oz" in the center - so I left it off. When it was finished I carefully folded it and put it in the glove compartment so we wouldn't forget it. After we entered Yosemite and were about five miles from the Wawona Hotel where the Winkies met back then I had mom pull the car over. I got out, attached the flag to the antenna, and we sailed on in to the Wawona, Oz colors flying.

Mom is gone now; but I still have the license plate and Oz flag. I don't like to admit it, but it seems pretty obvious to me now that I used Oz to replace the family that was dissolving before my eyes. It quite probably saved my life.