Variation on a Theme, Book 6
Copyright© 2024 by Grey Wolf
Chapter 106: Off To See The Wizard
Wednesday, March 5, 1986
My date with Amy kicked off the way they usually did. Wearing a fairly neutral set of clothes, I met her at her dorm room. Her outfit was her usual, too, except for the brand-new purple laces in her shoes. She thanked me for the idea, both verbally and with an enthusiastic kiss.
We’d decided not to go out for dinner tonight, but rather just eat at the Commons. I didn’t think that was indicative of any decline in our dating. It might actually mean the opposite. The dinner didn’t matter as much now in terms of wooing her or proving my sincerity. It was just a meal.
Dorm food is dorm food. There’s plenty of it and it won’t kill you (or, at least, not quickly). Some of it is tasty, but that’s usually the stuff that’s the worst for you. And some of it is just weird, like the neon-orange glop in the dessert area that, per Amy, did not even taste vaguely like oranges. Or mangoes, apricots, nectarines, cantaloupe, papaya, or even pumpkin. There might have been some other orange food it did taste like, but she couldn’t place it and had covered her bases in what she had ruled out.
I tried some. The best I could guess was grapefruit along with a ton of sugar and some gelatin. But it wasn’t really grapefruit either. At least, not good grapefruit. Maybe slightly fermented grapefruit?
In any case, dinner was mostly about catching up. She was looking forward to tomorrow’s team meeting. They had a fair bit of their project designed and the first parts implemented. Her goal was to have the adder, decoder, and memory circuits testable before Spring Break. They still had to work on clocking, programming, and output, though each of those would need partial implementation in order for any testing to proceed.
It sounded great to me, and I said so. She wasn’t skilled at presenting things, but a speech class would help with that, and it wasn’t a requirement at this point. The far more important point was that this Amy was not last fall’s Amy. This one could live her dream of being an engineer who made a difference.
I didn’t think that change was just my doing. She hadn’t really lacked self-confidence. Part of it was that she’d only changed majors last semester and had been new and uncertain about things. Still, it would be silly to believe none of it was me, especially when she was clear it was.
On the way to the movie, Amy said, “I was thinking something and wanted to check with you. Not ... it’s not that I think you would mind, at all, it’s just ... well, it would feel silly without asking you first.”
“What’s that?” I said.
“I was considering asking Jasmine on a date. Maybe this Friday or Saturday, if she can? I think we could use the time to get to know each other better, and ... differently.”
“Oh!” I said, squeezing her hand. “I’m pretty sure she would really like that.”
Amy gave me a cute, just slightly shy look.
“I was thinking so, too. It ... well. I probably hinted to you a few times...”
She switched a bit from shy to sly with that.
“ ... but this will be the first time I’ve really asked anyone out. Not that many girls do, I think.”
“Much more common for guys, but I think that will also be special for Jasmine.”
“I really like her. And I really like you. That’s obvious, but ... it’s important. Different,” she said.
“It is. Unless you want me to, I’m not going to mention it. It’ll be more fun if it’s a surprise.”
She chuckled just a bit, squeezed my hand, and said, “And more scary, but I’m not really scared. If she made me even a little scared, I wouldn’t think of asking her out.”
“Relationships can be scary. Believe me, I was very nervous when I proposed. We’d talked about it numerous times, I knew she was going to say yes, and it was still ... nearly petrifying. Pretty much, it’s ... the odds of something going wrong were extremely low. The consequences, at least for my heart, were extremely high. And people really suck at managing probabilities that way. High potential cost is weighted far more heavily than minuscule risk.”
“Interesting! I mean, all of it. That last part is ... I need to study more psychology.”
“It’s pretty interesting stuff. I haven’t had as much as I would like,” I said.
“I had a brief half-semester unit on it in high school. That’s basically nothing.”
“Sounds like it!”
She squeezed my hand again.
“This is good. It’s ... I feel like I can talk to you about anything. And I have the same feeling with Jasmine. That’s a major change in my life! I’m not there with Angie or Paige yet, but I feel like I can get there with time. I won’t ask them out anytime soon, though, and they would just be talking dates, anyway. With Jasmine, I know I’m attracted to her, so it’s not.”
She shot me another little sly look — even a bit of smirk — as she said that.
“And you know the feeling is mutual.”
“That, too. I am strange that way, maybe. I had very, very little in the way of ‘puppy love’ or ‘crushes.’ We talked about attractive men, and I have lists, but they’re only ... exciting ... if I imagine an entire personality, conversations, all of that. And even then, it’s ... complicated.”
“I’m fairly visual, I think, but more in the way you are. Looks have to be combined with personality. Jasmine is probably more likely to have that ‘love at first sight’ reaction than I am, really.”
“An interesting juxtaposition! But she’s clearly also mostly interested in who someone is at a deeper level.”
“Definitely!”
We arrived at the movie about then, so things switched to getting tickets, finding seats (it wasn’t crowded), and settling in (which, mostly, meant snuggling a bit). I couldn’t hold her as tightly as she preferred for the entire movie, but I could hold her some, and she really liked that. It was entirely sweet, too, befitting a movie that had its edgy parts but was completely safe for families.
Well, if they wouldn’t be too scared at the honestly scary parts of the film. Hollywood in the 1930s had been far more willing to really scare young children than Hollywood in the 1980s would ever consider. There were exceptions, but they weren’t ‘jump scares’ but heavier emotional beats. Belle believing the Beast was dead, for instance, might really affect younger children who were invested in the Beast’s continued well-being.
It occurred to me, belatedly, that ‘The Princess Bride’ might have suffered from that, somewhat. It had never been marketed well — not at all! — but part of that was that no one knew what it was, partly because they had tried too hard to claim it was for everyone. That, or they had tried to claim it was a zany comedy.
Honestly, it was for everyone, by and large. It had humor, action, romance, and drama, and was thoroughly family-friendly. It wasn’t a zany comedy, though. Hilarious, but a great deal of the comedy relied on witty dialogue. Not necessarily wordplay, but the sort of humor that came with ‘You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means’ or ‘My way isn’t very sporting, is it?’ wasn’t ‘zany.’
And it was a movie about a princess at a time when no one made movies about princesses. Who went to movies about princesses, anyway? Kids, of course!
Meanwhile, kids might well have had exactly the problem Fred Savage had expressed within the movie itself. If Westley was dead — and he was dead, no question about it! — how could the story have a happy ending? Even with it all working out, I could imagine younger audiences having a real problem getting past that part, even with Peter Falk encouraging them to keep listening and see where things went.
I was hardly the sort of marketing genius who could fix 20th Century Fox’s marketing campaign. Maybe someone would get it right this time.
If it even happened. If it didn’t, the management and I were going to have a serious conversation. I knew nearly everything about it, but there was no way I was going to single-handedly bankroll that movie within the right set of years for it to work. If it didn’t happen, that movie, as it had existed, would be gone.
Most of those thoughts happened during the first minute or two. Once ‘The Wizard of Oz’ started going, I was engrossed in it. For one thing, it was that good. There was a reason people were still watching it and would continue to do so thirty-five years from now. For another, Amy and I would undoubtedly talk about it.
And, for a third, I could compare and contrast it to things Amy couldn’t know about. I wouldn’t feel comfortable mentioning them, either, or even hinting, but they were on my mind.
I wasn’t even sure if it was well-known yet how much Margaret Hamilton had suffered from that makeup. Or how horribly the director and studio had treated Judy Garland. Both of them deserved awards just for getting through the filming.
Still, the resulting movie was a classic all the way around, and I hoped the actors were proud of it, even if resentful about what they’d endured along the way. I certainly wouldn’t want Jess treated that way, but I knew her. If she had to do it, but the resulting work was good, she would consider it worthwhile (at least if it hadn’t permanently harmed her, anyway).
In a sign of how good the movie was, I was invested in the story and characters, notwithstanding that I’d seen it many times before and knew how it was going to work out. Judging from her facial expressions, the occasional gasp or sigh, and her pressing in closer at the scarier parts, so was Amy.
After the movie, we headed back toward the dorm via our usual slower path. Amy had plenty to say, but she started it with, “Before we start walking, I figured I would ask: would you be interested in coming back to my dorm room?”
“I would indeed,” I said.
She grinned, kissed me, then started talking about the movie. We covered the usual topics: What was up with the Wizard? Con man? Good guy? Bad guy? Morally gray? Was Glinda as good as she claimed to be? Was the Wicked Witch as wicked? Why was she wicked, anyway? Given that the Wizard couldn’t be trusted, how trustworthy were the other authority figures?
Amy said, “I’m usually skeptical of authority, really. I think there are some very good people, but there are also some very bad people, and often you can’t tell. Probably because more of them start out good but turn bad, or at least I think they do. Many of their proposals sound good and work out to be awful, too.”
“That’s not a bad attitude, though it can lead to inaction.”
She nodded and said, “I try to vote and be informed, but it often feels like picking the lesser of two evils, rather than voting for anything I can really support.”
“That’s a problem of our system,” I said. “There are better voting systems. All of them have potential problems, but ours is one of the worst. It’s nearly designed to push the most partisan candidates to the front.”
“Hopefully, things will get better. In the meantime, well ... maybe some of them are like the Wizard. All talk, no real power, but that sort of talk is power. Get people believing in you and you can do a lot.”
“Sometimes tragically, but yes.”
“Much too often tragically,” she said, sighing. “Sometimes I...”
She paused long enough that I said, “What?”
“That was going to come out wrong. I was about to say, ‘Sometimes I forget how unusual I am.’ But I never forget that,” she said, laughing softly. “It’s more ... I forget how good my education was and is, and that I’m smarter than most people, and ... all of that. Not that smart people are immune — many smart people get tricked, too — but I feel like many people just don’t see what’s going on in the same way.”
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