Dear President Leonid Vladimirsky, Vice-President Sergei Sukhinov, and
General Director Yanko Kirkov,
Greetings from Fresno, California, where I live and work. Greetings from
the International Wizard of Oz Club, where we, too, are celebrating the
150th birthday of L. Frank Baum. Thank you so much for these wonderful
photos. I have forwarded them to my email mailing list of Oz board members
and advisors, and I know that they will enjoy them. I'm sure that some of
them willl eventually appear in The Baum Bugle, too.
The event you have planned sound terrrific and I wish that I could be there
for both of them. We are planning lots of celebrations here, too:
This week I am preparing to join many other Oz enthusiasts and Club leaders
at an three-day event called OZ-MANIA in Syracuse, New York. For my part I
will give two related PowerPoint (computer slide) presentations, one on the
Club and the other about how I became an Oz fan (it was in my blood--I am
the third generation Oz fan in my family). One of my great joys in being
president is getting messages and photos from my friends in Russia. So now I
will incorporate these photos into my presentation. Next year our Club will
celebrate its 50th anniversary. I don't have historical photos as I did not
join the Club until the 1970s, but other members do and I'm sure we'll have
pictures to share with you, too. The website for OZ-MANIA is at
http://www.landofozpres.com/ozmania.html.
Later this summer the Club's three regional conventions will be held.
Munchkins meet in the East, in Princeton, New Jersey. Ozmopolitans meet in
the Midwest, in the Chicago area, at Naperville, Illinois. Winkies meet in
the West, near Monterey, California. You can read about these at the Club
website at www.ozclub.org
I will be a speaker at the Ozmopolitan convention, discussing a girls'
series, The Aunt Jane's Nieces Books, written by L. Frank Baum, using a
pseudonym, Edith Van Dyne. These books are very much related to Baum's own
life, as he uses settings and incidents that he experienced. Do you know
these stories?
While in Chicago I will also be giving a lecture on L. Frank Baum and the Oz
books at the Newberry Library. My website is www.angelicacarpenter.com.
Later in the summer I will go to Amherst, Massachusetts, to the opening of
"The Wonderful Art of Oz," an exhibition of the work of many illutrators at
the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. The exhibition is being curated
by Michael Patrick Hearn, author of The Annotated Wizard of Oz. The Club
will sponsor an appearance by Robert Sabuda (http://www.robertsabuda.com/)
at the opening. He is known for his pop-up books--again I wonder if you know
these books?--especially for his pop-up version of the first Oz book. When
you open to the tornado page, it pops up and twirls! The museum's website is
at http://www.picturebookart.org/ . Click on Programs/Upcoming Events/Check
out our new summer calendar.
I will also be going to the annual conference of the Children's Literature
Association in Los Angeles. Their theme is "Transformations," which includes
children's books that have been made into movies. Many presentations are
planned about Oz and I hope to get some of the speakers to agree to have
their talks published in the Bugle. The website is at
http://chla.wikispaces.com/. The full conference schedule, which is quite
long, is posted there.
Since I am a librarian, I will also attend the annual conference of the
American Library Association in New Orleans. There I will talk about Oz to
anyone who will listen!
So I will really be on the road (the yellow brick road, of course), or in
the air, almost constantly for Oz this summer, and I know that many other
members of the Club are celebrating in many other ways, doing things I don't
know about and some that I do. I hope that many events will get written up
in the Bugle.
I wish you the best of luck with your celebrations and hope that you will
write us about them after they have taken place and send us some more
photos. I'll send you some from our events, too.
Ozzy best wishes to all of you,
Angelica Carpenter, President
International Wizard of Oz Club
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