No Space Like Dome
by Laurie Woolever
I went to Las Vegas last weekend to appear on a panel at the Las Vegas Book Festival. It was held on the grounds of the Historic Fifth Street School, just one city block away from a No Kings rally, which meant that there were several dozen armed and uniformed cops on the streets nearby, and what sounded like as many helicopters overhead. After the rally a number of protesters appeared, still carrying their pro-democracy, anti-authoritarian signs through the fair, where authors and retailers and librarians and book lovers had converged under tents and in the open sunlight, to buy and sell and talk about and admire books.
I was sorry to miss the rally, but glad to see evidence of it. There was a second No Kings rally later that day, right on the Strip, but I missed that one, too, because it began just as I was ascending, via several steep, slow, and extra-long escalators, to my seat for the 5 p.m. showing of Wizard of Oz at [the] Sphere Las Vegas.
Yes, it’s officially just “Sphere,” not “the Sphere,” though dropping the definite article when referring to the snow-globe-shaped, tech-intensive entertainment arena, conceived by James “Born on Third Base” Dolan and built by many thousands of people at a cost of more than $2 billion, makes me feel like a bit of a chump. So I’ll take my cue from Nick Paumgarten, who wrote about the Sphere for the New Yorker last year, and ignore this commercial directive.
The 1939 MGM film adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a singularly weird and great piece of American art that, during the most impressionable years of my childhood, was broadcast on TV on just one magical day every year. Also, L. Frank Baum was born in my hometown of Chittenango, New York, in 1857. The town installed yellow brick sidewalks in the late 1970s, and at that time began to host an Oz parade and festival. It’s a procession of bagpipe bands and Girl Scouts and elected officials and the all-female royal court of local dairy families, a procession which I have at various times found exciting (my Brownie troop took part, in 1982), charming (ultra-geriatric Munchkin actors Jerry Maren and Meinhardt Raabe made several guest appearances), and depressing (a McDonald’s-sponsored piece of farm equipment was once helmed by a clearly miserable middle-aged man in Ronald drag).
Keep us breathing fire!
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