emu suicide

Last night I plodded down to Resa's house, where I decided to point out a scene in "The Wizard of Oz" to Resa in which a woman hangs herself. We watched it and were sufficiently spooked, and then began tending to our batch of popcorn and setting up "Toy Story."

After the movie had concluded, we plopped down next to Resa's computer and began chatting with various people, one of them being Bryan, who is currently under the imposing shadow of my merciless wrath because he has failed to update his diary in over a month. Regardless, Resa told him about the distinct figure in the background of "The Wizard of Oz," and Bryan immediately referred to it as "the munchkin suicide," and that it's the substance of urban legend. Resa and I scoffed at this -- only two hours before we had clearly seen the figure of a woman decked out in a dress hanging herself, as Dorothy and her two yuppies skipped down the yellow brick road. Having never seen the entire movie, Bryan didn't denounce our claim, instead redirecting us to an urban legend reference page so we could examine the validity for ourselves. We read through the summary explaining that it wasn't a woman hanging herself; it was an emu that had been on loan from a zoo in California. Resa and I watched the video clip included on the page, still unbelieving that the murky figure could be passed off as an emu, and chalked up how one could mistaken the woman as an emu due to the bad picture quality and the absence of color. Eager to verify our earlier observations, we pushed "The Wizard of Oz" back into the VCR, once again cueing the tape. And as we again witnessed the trippy trio skipping down the road, arms linked, we saw that what we had originally so clearly seen as a hopeless woman was now an emu, pecking absentmindedly at the ground. The emu's egg-shaped body and rod-like legs and gone completely unseen.

We laughed our asses off. Resa laughed because she was amused that she mistaken a woman for an ostrich. I laughed at the fact that I believed three people would innocently engage in song and skip along a road as they witnessed a woman killing herself among the shadows of pretend trees.