In search of that land where dreams really do come true

Country Living with Francis Farragher

Sometimes, I take what I might describe as an unusual notion, and a couple of weeks back, I thought to myself that it had been a long time since the threshold of a cinema door had been crossed.  There was a time when I’d sit down and watch a film on TV but now a myriad of distractions seem to intervene . . . either the phone rings . . . someone lands into the kitchen for a chat . . . there’s a dispute over who wants to watch what . . . and then the ‘flick’ is abandoned for other sources of entertainment.

Anyway, straying back into childhood days, and normally around Christmas time, the Wizard of Oz always seemed to on the television in glorious black and white (not the film’s fault but the TV’s) where Judy Garland played the most innocent and sweetest of roles as Dorothy Gale.

It was a film of fantasy, music and dreams, only to be watched with a loose window of imagination, but there always seemed to be a purity of innocence and spirit in Dorothy Gale (Judy Garland) that could never be challenge.

A star of cinema and known all over the world before she had reached the age of 18, the world seemed to be at her feet, but as the years passed and our innocence was gradually eroded by the experiences of the world, we’d read newspaper stories here and there of Judy Garland’s rather troubled personal life.

So, it was with a mixture of starry-eyed childhood flashbacks of rainbows and beautiful chords and the harsh realities of adult life, that a few of us embarked on a mission to see Judy, a little unsure as to whether we should have put at risk our little memory treasures from younger days.

The story of the life of Frances Ethel Gumm, aka Judy Garland, was of course far removed from the happy images that we associate with her roles in different films. The first assault on her innocence was at the age of two, when she was put on stage to sing her first song, and after that her childhood was never really her own.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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