Sorry, Toto -- Still In Kansas

[mallorys_camera]

JUMP: Hooker, Oklahoma --> Hugoton, Kansas – Stevens County Fairgrounds: 30 miles
RIGHT out of the lot... LEFT onto MAIN STREET
LEFT onto JEFFERSON/CO ROAD 18 NORTH into Kansas
LEFT onto HWY 51 WEST to Hugoton... arrows to lot
Shows at 2pm/4:30pm

I was gonna whine some more about fuckin’ Oklahoma. But then it dawned on me – I’m in fuckin Kansas. Relatively prosperous town of Hugoton, just down the road from Garden City and the former Clutter home – scene of much unpleasantness back in ‘59 that culminated in a lengthy visit from Truman Capote.

Capote is one of two great writers whose names are inextricably linked with the state of Kansas. Yet it’s impossible – impossible for me at any rate – to imagine him here.

The other great writer is L. Frank Baum, author of the Oz books. There are at least two Oz museums in Kansas, one of them in Liberal (it’s not) where I got lost yesterday looking for – what else? – the local Walmart.

The tourist center where I stopped for directions was next to something called Dorothy’s House.
“Bless my soul,” said the lady behind the counter. “Yes, L. Frank Baum taught school here. This was before he wrote The Book, of course.”

Such a nice looking lady she was too, graying hair, glasses. She tried to give me a refrigerator magnet: Liberal, Kansas – THE LAND OF OZ.

Except the bitch lied to me!!!!!!! L. Frank Baum never lived in Kansas, in fact he set foot here exactly once and then only for a couple of days. “Kansas” was just Baum’s code word for a place that’s gray and boring but which for some strange reason you don’t want to leave.

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I had to go to Walmart to print out Petra's birthday card. Petra – the third of America’s Foremost Unicycling Family’s performing daughters and some might say the most beautiful (photo does not do her justice) – was about to turn fourteen. She is mad about two things – horses and Twilight, so I thought it might be fun to Photoshop her into the movie poster. If I’d spent more than 20 minutes on it, I would have gotten the skin tones right. But damn. The whole vampire phenomenon bores me. I hated Anne Rice too and what's Twilight but Anne Rice Lite?