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 trans fixed and I fell in love with a 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 Genovese,

which today would be the equivalent of Duane 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 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 back to New York. They must have listened to it about a hundred times.

She managed to just get right into the

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 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.

I got rhythm, I got music, I got my man who could ask for a living more.

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