This one took me a while

For a long time, I stared at this thing thinking “What in god’s name does this have to do with prison?”

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. A little slow today.

Here’s some random trivia for you. I worked (very briefly), writing articles for the school paper when I was an undergraduate at Indiana University. Keep in mind now, I wasn’t a Journalism major… just some English major who wanted to see what the whole article-writing gig was like (I did some book reviews for another Bloomington publication, but that’s for another time).

So one of my only assignments for the paper was to cover an L. Frank Baum special exhibit that took place at the Lilly Library. There, I ended up finding out some neat tidbits (wish I still had the whole article for you).

Let’s see… Baum originally started telling his children stories before bedtime. Most of them revolved around a character (Dorothy), and her adventures. At some point, his kids asked where these stories took place. Looking over at a nearby filing cabinet, Baum happened to see the letters on each drawer: A-G, H-N, O-Z.

Salman Rushdie claims that the Wizard of Oz was his “very first literary influence.” Well, he says so at least in the book he wrote about the Wizard of Oz. Oh, and did I mention that the very first short story he ever wrote (at age 10) was entitled “Over the Rainbow?”

I did a quick Google search for keywords I found on this brick. Unfortunately, it’s some kind of political-satire musical? I really hoped it was just some random artist person, leaving these bricks around the city, trying to remind everyone how they were once young and dreamed of fantastical places beyond the everyday.