This podcast contains explicit language.

I remember the first time I saw it, I was just five years old, four and a half, and it was my birthday, because they would always screen it in the springtime.

And my aunt sat me down in front of the television set in our house in Queens Village.

And it was like a religious experience.

I was transfixed and I fell in love with the little girl in the Blue Kingdom dress.

We must be over the rainbow.

When I was 12, we were going on a family vacation, and we were in a place called

Genevice, which today would be the equivalent of Dwayne Reed. And there was audio cassettes.

There was one that said Judy Garland over the rainbow. And I looked at the cassette and I said,

well, she kind of looks like Dorothy, but she's older. And I showed it to my mom and I said, well, she kind of looks like Dorothy, but she's older.

And I showed it to my mom and she said, yeah, she did more than just The Wizard of Oz. She made other movies. She played Carnegie Hall. She had a television series and she made record albums. And I was like, Dorothy made records. How cool. So they bought me that cassette. and I made my family listen to that tape all the way to Hershey, Pennsylvania

and all the way

to Hershey Pennsylvania and all the way back to New York they must have listened to it about a

hundred times she managed to just get right into the deepest recesses of somebody's soul and

she could tap into the sadness but more importantly the joy within

someone and i was miserable enough as a as an adolescent so i never viewed judy as a tragic figure

she represented this great sense of joy to me and that's what the voice represented to me

i got rhythm i got rhythm. I got music. I got my man who could ask for anything more.

I've got daisies in green pastures. I got my man who could ask for anything more.

My name is Peter Mack, and I'm a Judy Garland tribute artist. I have been now for 17 years.

This is Decodering, a show about cracking cultural mysteries.

I'm Willa Paskin.

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