The Wiz

My mother had an LP of this broadway show that she played incessantly through my early childhood. Not the Diana Ross/Michael Jackson Motown version, but the Stephanie Mills as "Dorothy" version. I both loved and hated this album. I loved the emotion I could hear in some of the songs; I hated how often I heard it in our house, and used to feel somewhat imprisoned by the tireless repetition of it. My mother could listen to this album all day while cleaning or just puttering about. To say that it was in heavy rotation is putting it mildly.

Lizz Wright does a version of "Soon as I get home" from that show on her album "Salt," and I found myself wanting to own a recording of the show for myself after listening to her soulful rendition. It was fortunate that BMG distributes the recording on CD, so I ordered it. When I put it in my portable compact disc player this afternoon and heard the opening strains of the first song, I began to cry in memory of my mother and me when I was young (This album was the soundtrack of my childhood from the time I was 3 until I was 5 or 6). Not sadness, but just the immediacy with which the memory of our apartment, her face, how I felt, etc., came rushing back to me, caused me to weep.

I was delighted to read in the liner notes that this show first opened at the Morris A. Mechanic theatre in Baltimore on October 21, 1974. I was just over a year old. It seems so right to me that something so native to my early years should have had its roots here in Charm city.