Daily Dialogue — November 23, 2014

“Oh, you’re the best friends anybody ever had.”

— The Wizard of Oz (1939), screenplay by Noel Langley & Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf, adaptation by Noel Langley, based on a novel by L. Frank Baum

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Friendship.

Trivia: In 1898, Dorothy Louise Gage was born to the brother and sister-in-law of Maud Gage Baum, wife of author L. Frank Baum. When little Dorothy died exactly five months later, Maud was heartbroken. Baum was just finishing “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” and, to comfort his wife, named his heroine after Dorothy, changing her last name to Gale in his second book. Dorothy Gage was buried in Evergreen Memorial Cemetery in Bloomington, Illinois, where her grave was forgotten until 1996 when it was rediscovered. When Mickey Carroll, one of the last existing Munchkins from the movie, learned of the discovery, he was eager to replace her deteriorated grave marker with a new one created by his own monument company. The new stone was dedicated in 1997 and the children’s section of the cemetery renamed the Dorothy L. Gage Memorial Garden, in the hope that bereaved families would be comforted in thinking of their lost children as being with Dorothy from “The Wizard of Oz”.

Dialogue On Dialogue: The friendship Dorothy develops with Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion serves as a bridge for her to feel a connection to the farm in Kansas. When she returns, her home now feels a home. A real one.