Alice and Dorothy

I have a very strange obsession with two classic fantasy novels.  As you can tell from the title, they are "Alice in Wonderland" and "The Wizard of Oz".  I have to admit, I have not yet read the original "Alice in Wonderland".  I own, two copies actually.  One in print with pictures, the other on my kindle.  I will read it.  I have to.  It's not really something I can avoid.  These two series intrigue me.  I am officially obsessed.  I have watched as many possible iterations of each that I can.  From the classic Disney version of Alice and the first color movie of Oz to the knock-offs.  The recreations.  I love them.  Over and over again, I will watch them.  I can't figure out what it is that so attracts me to these stories.

Perhaps I have a deep-set need for disappearing into a fantastical world.  A world that is like and unlike ours.  Where you can pick out similarities between the characters and people you know.  Or maybe it's the fact that the worlds can be written and rewritten however you want them to be.  They can be this day and age or 50 or 100 years ago.  They can have actual animals, or people dressed like those animals might seem as people (the lion as a general, albeit, one that's never been to war or even considered it; the white rabbit a nervous little man persistently certain he's late for something, anything).

I'm fascinated by each newly envisioned world for Alice and Dorothy.  Each different persons view on how it should be.  I want to fall into each world like Alice fell into the rabbit hole or Dorothy's house fell on the Wicked Witch of the East.  I want friends like the Mad Hatter or Scarecrow.  I want to have that chance to, just for a moment, disappear from the real world.  I want to enter a world that's topsy-turvy.  Something entirely different from the reality I'm used to.  I want that escape from reality.  But only for a short time.  Long enough to realize, just like Alice and Dorothy, that there's no place like home.