When my brother and I were teenagers, we were great friends with a guy who lived across the street, whom I'll call Wes. Wes was very tall and played basketball. The three of us hung around together and were frequently over at his house watching television. Wes had a little brother named Johnny, who must have been about three or four at the time this episode in question took place.
As it turns out, Johnny had already seen The Wizard Of Oz in his very young life, and he talked about it all the time, often right out of the blue. Only he had a bit of trouble pronouncing it. He called it "The Wizard Gizard", and we all got a huge kick out of hearing him rattle on about it. "When we gonna see The Wizard Gizard again, Wes?" Remember, this was way before videos and DVDs -- you had to wait for a movie or TV show to come around in its over-the-air broadcast slot, and that was it. If you missed it, there wasn't another showing for a long, long time.
One afternoon, my brother, Wes, and I were all watching television when Johnny waddled into the room in the most urgent fashion. At one end of the TV room was a big sliding glass door with a curtain in front of it, and Johnny headed straight for it, disappearing behind the curtain as if he were playing hide-and-seek.
"What is Johnny doing?" I asked Wes, who immediately started giggling.
"It's something he does now and then," Wes replied. "He's going behind the curtain to take a dump." Wes kept on giggling, and I couldn't help but wonder what was up with that.
What was up -- and later out -- was Johnny actually pinching a loaf in his pants behind the curtain. We all heard his long-winded, ominous grunting, and Wes assured us that he would soon emerge with his pants bulging, at which point he'd waddle to the bathroom posthaste.
"Nobody tries to stop him?" I asked incredulously. "I mean, from doing it in his pants?"
Wes assured me that it was only a phase Johnny was going through, and that their father, who was a doctor, had told the rest of the family to leave him alone and not make a big deal out of it.
Fascinated by the whole idea even as it was happening, I wanted more information. "How did this get started?" I asked.
Wes said that as nearly as they could all figure out, Johnny had become so wrapped up in his Wizard Gizard that he wanted to act as much like the Wizard as he could. So, they surmised, just like The Wizard, Wes would disappear behind the curtain to produce some magic... err, to produce something, anyway.
Sure enough, after Johnny had finished grunting, he tentatively peered from behind the curtain, smiled at us, and then made his way toward the bathroom. At this point both my brother and I were giggling along with Wes. Even though I could hear The Great Oz Himself shouting at me to "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!", it was impossible not to focus on this little boy who, at the moment, was as fully-loaded as a top-shelf restaurant baked potato.
"Does anyone ever help him clean up?" I finally asked.
Wes said that after initial attempts to stop this routine, the family had decided to take their father's advice and let him work his way through it. They had been assured that eventually he would get bored with the whole thing, stop pretending to be The Wizard pooping behind a curtain, and sit down like any normal child on the porcelain throne.
All of this came flooding back the other night as I watched hundreds of Munchkins emerging from the flowers to greet Dorothy as she made her grand Wicked Witch-crushing entrance to Oz. Which, for some reason, brought the absurdly amusing notion of Munchkin mini-droppings to mind.