Tale #43: The Power of Manifestation

Summer in Wisconsin is really three seasons in one: lake season, construction season, and tornado season.

Tornadoes are scary. There are no bones about it. They are horrific storms that cause irreparable damage.

However, when you have tornado warnings every other week, you do get a bit desensitized to the danger involved.

In 2011, I was a senior in high school choreographing The Wizard of Oz at VACT as my final show before college. Mama Terry was the director for this trip down the yellow brick road. It was an early June night and we were set to do a run of the show.

It was either an ACT I run or a full run I cannot remember.

There had been reports that there could be some rain and maybe some storms that evening. Nothing that warranted cancelling rehearsal.

Inclement weather in Wisconsin is a given. Tornadoes and thunderstorms in the summer and snowstorms and polar vortexes in the winter. If we as an organization were to cancel rehearsal at every early sign of inclement weather, we’d rarely rehearse.

So we all know how The Wizard of Oz starts: Dorothy is in Kansas, she runs away, she tries to get home, a tornado comes, and next thing she knows she’s in a technicolor world filled with Munchkins, Witches, and fantastic footwear.

We were actively in the twister scene in our run through when we could hear the actual weather outside start to pick up. As we settled into Munchkinland, things were sounding grim.

Now, this was in the early days of Smartphone technology and apple watches weren’t around yet. There was no immediate notification system like we have now to tell us what was going on outside. So my mom had me pull out my laptop and look at the local news website for a weather update as she continued the run.

What had initially been forecasted as yellow on the doppler radar had quickly turned into a dark, menacing, ruby-slipper-esque shade of red.

We were in a tornado warning.

Our tornado scene was just so convincing and so powerful that we clearly manifested a tornado. That’s how good the show was. There’s no other explanation.

Ahhh the power of theater.

They say to always save women and children first so, we saved the Munchkins and Dorothy.

Ironically, we had just made it to the “come out come out wherever you are” part of Munchkinland. Then we said, just kidding, go back and hide.

We shoved all of our youth cast members in the only two rooms in the building that had no windows and were completely interior: the bathrooms.

This show was rehearsed in our old pole-shed rehearsal building so there weren’t many areas in the building that met the recommendations set forth by the weather channel for proper tornado shelter.

It was a sight. We took pictures of all of the children squished shoulder to shoulder, sitting on the nasty, boxelder bug-infested bathroom floor. The pictures even ended up in the local paper.

Once the storm started to recede away from the building, cast members started to leave. A lot of the children in the show had a parent or relative also in the cast, so they were excused to leave with their families.

My mom, myself, and a handful of other staff members waited with the remaining children.

One little girl was adamant that even when her mom arrived, she was not going outside. If there was a tornado outside, this little girl wanted to be inside.

Her mom arrived and quickly ushered her eldest child out to the car. When she came back for the girl, the girl put her foot down and refused to go. So, as any parent would, the mom picked her up and carried her out the door.

She grabbed the door frame, held on for dear life, and screamed bloody murder. The fear was real. It took a couple of us to pry her strong little fingers off the door frame so her mom could get her home.

My mom and I were only ten minutes away from our house, so we waited until everyone had been picked up, closed up the building, and were the last ones out.

On the drive home, there was debris everywhere. Tree branches, signs, garbage bins, etc. Even though an official tornado didn’t touch down by us, the residual effects of the storm were pretty daunting to see.

I feel very lucky to never have lived through an actual tornado. The closest was when my husband and I were living in Madison and a tornado hit his work five miles away.

Now I live in California where tornadoes aren’t a thing. We just have earthquakes, fires, droughts, floods, heatwaves….

I don’t think an earthquake has ever transported anyone into a fantasy land in a musical before.