The next day I attended a multimedia presentation by Dan Mapes, chief technology officer of the Oz Entertainment Co., which is spearheading an effort to break ground later this year for a massive Oz theme park in Kansas. To be located on 9,000 acres outside Kansas City, it will be at least as ambitious and technologically state-of-the-art as Disneyland.

Visitors will enter via a "tornado ride," in which they'll buckle themselves into chairs in Auntie Em's farmhouse and then be tossed about while computer-generated cows and bicycles go flying by. After "landing" with a thud, they'll open the front door to see a faithful replica of Munchkinland, and follow the proverbial road through cornfields, forests and poppies to reach the Emerald City.

"If you're an Oz fan, this is going to be the Vatican," gushed Mapes before he showed off an animated fly-through of the park. (I later discovered that the project has faced organized resistance from a Kansas citizens group called Taxpayers Opposed To Oz, or TOTO, but I digress.)

After Mapes' whiz-bang presentation, an enthusiastic woman piped up with the question apparently on everybody's mind: "Is there going to be a gift shop?" I also dropped by the session called "The Appeal of 'Oz' for Gay Men." According to presenter Dee Michel, this was apparently something of a milestone: the first time the G-word had appeared in the national club's official program.

Michel, a consultant who has taught library cataloging at the University of Wisconsin, said that although it's rarely discussed openly, he surmises that gay men make up considerably more than 10 percent of the club's membership.

In fact, this session's standing-room-only crowd included a large lavender contingent, as well as others like the grandmotherly Ozzie from New Jersey who sat down next to me. "I want to understand what this whole gay thing is about," she said pleasantly. By the end of Michel's talk about gay role models in "Oz" -- the lion "born to be a sissy" and the tin woodsman ("not gay, but certainly not a macho man") -- she'd had several "Aha!" experiences.

Among other things, she heard that gay appropriation of such elements as rainbow iconography and "Friend of Dorothy" code phrases probably amounts to more than simple diva worship. As Michel observed, "Judy Garland made lots of movies, but nobody runs around naming bars after 'Meet Me in St. Louis.'"

Michel also suggested that the Land of Oz holds a special allure for those who are different because it is, as one writer put it, a place that's "fiercely tolerant of the outlandish" and a "community of eccentrics."

Indeed, one of the striking things about the Oz phenomenon is the very different people it brings together, whether out of a shared love for the books, the movie or both. "Oz is too universal to belong to any one group," John Fricke, author of "100 Years of Oz," told me. "You can say 'Scarlett O'Hara' or 'Rosebud' to anybody under 30, and they won't know what you're talking about. Show a picture of Madonna to most people over 50, and they won't know who she is. But show a picture of Dorothy to anybody over 18 months, and you've immediately started a conversation."

Kenneth Reckford, a longtime classics professor at the University of North Carolina, had taken time out from translating Greek to attend the convention with his grown daughter and present a talk on images of children and childish adults in "Oz." Although he usually lectures on the likes of Aristophanes, here he clearly relished talking about Flutterbudgets, Jack Pumpkinhead and Tik-Tok. Afterward, he too remarked on the way that the "spiritual citizens of Oz" constitute such a disparate collection of people.

"They're all over the country, conservative and liberal, 'respectable' and hippie, straight and gay. There's a tremendous variety of people in the club, people who wouldn't normally be friends but who are all brought together by the love of this wonderful place."

It would be tempting to try to pick out the looniest tunes here, to look for those who tend to obsess, Trekkie-like, over the finer points of Ozian cartography or the relative merits of Winkies and Quadlings. But the truth is that I really didn't run into much of that. Mostly I kept running into lovers of literature, teachers, librarians, editors, husbands good-naturedly going along with a wife's passion for the "Oz" books, wives gamely indulging a husband's collecting, parents eager to introduce their children to books they'd loved as kids themselves and boomers happy to be sharing the festivities with an aging parent.

(One such pair was Tulsa, Okla., travel agent Susan Hall and her 75-year-old mother, Shirley, who won this year's costume contest for her portrayal of a Scalawagon, a kind of self-driving Oz taxi. This involved slicing out the bottom of a purple and orange play tent, then fitting it over Shirley's wheelchair in a way that let her slowly tool around the ballroom while wearing a plastic bowl on her head. "I run on Flabbergas," the white-haired woman kept explaining to bystanders.)

In a summer when millions of Americans are zoning out in front of reality shows to watch "When Bad Things Happen to Boring People," there's something undeniably sweet about a gathering devoted to this homegrown American fairy tale that extols the virtues of, in Reckford's words, "gentleness, humor, kindness and justice."

Not only that, there's a refreshing lack of self-consciousness about the way that, as Fricke put it, "'Oz' fans aren't afraid to wear their hearts on their sleeves."

And there is something heartening about the fact that, for hundreds of such fans, those four days away from home only served to confirm that, hey, come to think of it, there's no place like Oz -- with the possible exception of an "Oz" convention.

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