2
By time Sunday Date Night rolled round again, Theresa was anxious to go out and get out of the shop again. When she wasn't dealing with customers in the shop, she was dealing with the kids as a mother. When it wasn't the kids or the shop, it was dealing with the repercussions of having magic in the family. Unlike a lot of people, she had actually met and encountered ghosts, vampires, werewolves – whether that girl Justin dated was a true werewolf was still a matter of debate – and even a few mythologicals. Anyone else in her position might have lost it, but she was proud of the fact that she was holding her. She had a loving husband who was funny, smart and quirky, two sons she was proud of and a daughter… Well, she was sure Alex might someday grow up.
It was Sunday night again. The shop always closed early at five so that Jerry and Theresa could go out. Harper was over again this night, and the kids were pretending to be distracted as they waited for their parents to go. Justin was reading and doing work from his history book, Alex and Harper were watching bits and pieces of TV shows on separate channels and Max was sitting on the floor by the bookcase unstocking and stacking books into a new separate sequence. Jerry walked through and looked upon them suspiciously.
"So…" He looked at them. "What will you kids be doing?"
"Nothing much…"
"Hanging…"
"Watching TV…."
"That's nice…" Theresa looked at them suspiciously as well. "So, Justin, your father and I have a dinner date with Mr. Collins and his wife then catching a movie afterward. Your father left money for you guys to order a pizza."
"Got it…" Justin nodded his head to show he understood. "So, dad, how do you know a guy like Mister Collins?"
"I don't." Jerry spoke as Theresa modified his tie. "Someone told him that I was an expert in witchcraft and magic in the Middle Ages, and he wants to meet me. Truthfully, I'm a little nervous. He's a pretty famous writer."
"His family has a lot of money." Theresa fixed Jerry's tie and looked to Justin. "They own a big house up in Maine called Collinwood. It's going to be so nice to meet regular people without ghosts, vampires and magic in their lives!"
"Yeah…" Jerry looked to her then Justin. "Son, you're in charge, money for a pizza is on the counter and if anything happens, we'll be at the Worsham's for dinner then at the theater. Got it?"
"Got it." Justin stood and rose as he watched his parents depart. Alex and Harper looked up briefly and Max took a moment from color-coordinating the books. Jerry and Theresa were heading out for dinner and a movie. They went out the door, and Justin started counting down from five, four, three, two, one…
"Aha!!!" Jerry suddenly rushed back. "I caught you guys suddenly…" He looked round. Justin was still standing there, Harper and Alex were vegetating on the sofa... Max was thumbing through an old book on the American Old West. Nothing was happening.
"We'll be home by ten…" Jerry looked round, palmed his hair back then hesitantly headed off to dinner with William and Ally Collins. Theresa pulled her wrap over her shoulders, took her husband's arm and escorted him away with a trusting glance to her kids. They were really heading off this time. Even so, Justin waited two whole minutes before reacting.
"Movie adventure night!!!" Justin lit up as everyone jumped to their feet. "Okay, Alex…" Justin and Max feared Alex's choice of a movie to star in. "What torture chamber of a movie are you going to be starring us in?"
"One of my favorites…" Alex pulled it out. "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory!" She was grinning ear-to-ear. Her brothers suddenly calmed and smiled to each other. That was her threat? They thought she might have Nightmare on Elm Street or something. Even Harper was excited!
"What's bad about that?" Justin was eagerly calm about her choice. "I get a golden ticket and win a chocolate factory!"
"Not in my version…" Alex was strolling to the VCR-DVD player. "I hope you like swimming in the chocolate river!" She looked to Justin, paused and turned to Harper. "Harper, here's some gum for the movie… start chewing."
"Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa…" Justin was screaming for a time out. "Not the fat kid, Alex. Not the fat kid!"
"I'm not wearing a dress either!" Max scolded her. He jerked the DVD away from Alex.
"Actually," Alex looked to Max and tried to grab the movie back. "I thought of you as the kid who gets shrunk!"
"Alex…" Even Harper was offended as she posed with the gum. "The gun chewer? She gets turned into a blueberry!"
"We have a lot of much better movies here!" Justin held her choice of movie hostage and checked out the family's movie collection. "Look, Alex, here's a good one: Mary Poppins!"
Alex looked at him disgusted.
"I am not singing and dancing!" She refused.
"Here's one…" Max found a good one. "Van Helsing!"
"We already did the vampire thing, dude." Justin refused that one. "And it almost killed us." He chucked his father's movie across the loft.
"Hey guys…" Harper was waiting by the TV. "I brought a movie from home." She pulled out a blank plastic DVD cover from her purse, but they didn't hear her. They were too busy running through their family's VHS and DVD collection.
"Hey, The Goonies!"
"Pass!" Alex rejected that one too.
"Here's one!" Max had another movie from his father's collection. "Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman!" He and Justin turned and looked to Alex from head to toe. "Pass!!!" They rejected it before Alex could.
"Guys…" Harper couldn't tell if they heard her or not. "I brought a movie from my house. I'm going to load it and speed ahead to the best part." She turned and took her DVD out and placed it into the Russo's DVD player. The others were not listening to her. Alex was rejecting everything Justin and Max were trying to foist on her.
"The Princess Bride!" Justin offered.
"I've got bad memories of that one, dude." Max rejected that one and found another. "Hey, how about dad's Benny Hill Compilation set?"
"Pass!" Alex vehemently refused that one. "Look, Justin, you forced me into Star Wars, and now… you're suffering through my choice. Harper, where's the movie?"
"It's in the machine." Harper replied as Alex whipped out her wand.
"Not, the fat kid, Alex! Not the fat kid!!!" Justin was recoiling in shock as he and Max held on to each other. Max was going to be the TV kid. Harper was going to be the gum-chewer, leaving the little heiress to be played by herself. Alex waved her wand and called out Justin's spell.
"Literary Hollywood Terrarium!!!" Alex and the others were turned into light being sucked into the movie, but it was not the movie Alex expected. It was another movie. One that Harper had chosen, and as such, Harper's thoughts decreed who got what roles. As the lights faded away, Harper found herself wearing a blue and white gingham dress. Her long hair was now trussed into pigtails, and she was suddenly standing in a little farmhouse off its foundation. The floor was badly slanting and puttering around her feet was a little terrier. Everything looked like it was in shades of brown as sunlight streamed through the distorted windows of the wrecked parlor. She began grinning ear to ear upon realizing where she was! She had loved this movie since she was a little kid, and now through Alex, she could finally enter it! She picked up the little dog too excited to speak, squeezed him lovingly and hurried from the house with a light hop off the porch.
She was in the middle of a large round swirling courtyard with bricks of red, yellow, blue and green. All around her were beautiful flourishing gardens with large flowers and gigantic trees with a stream flowing under a little bridge into the quaint little village. Interspersed in these gardens and around her were small sized children's houses. Her face about to burst with excitement, her heart pounding like a child on Christmas morning, it was all more beautiful than she thought. It wasn't hot here. If there was a sun, it was hidden by the clouds in the blue and white sky. The horizon looked like a movie backdrop with purple mountains, colorful gardens and a rolling landscape of muffin-shaped hills as far as the eyes could see, but there were subtle signs of the wind blowing the plants and the clouds up high drifting. The land about her had all these round little homes with doors no higher than her waist. There was not a sign of the little denizens, but she could hear them, chattering and squeaking from inside the gardens.
"Alex!" Harper called out. "Justin! Max!!!" They were nowhere near her. Holding her little dog, Harper immediately wanted to go exploring, but then she saw it. It was a large round bubble floating from out of the sky. It glided and bobbed, elegantly flying over the tips of the flowers and houses, coming to rest in a small path before fading away. From within it stepped a beautiful woman with a high crown and long dress of white. She looked at Harper curiously with great intrigue.
"Are you a good witch or a bad witch?" She spoke in a charming and quirky aristocratic voice.
"I'm not a witch at all!" Harper excitedly repeated the lines she had memorized over several years. "I'm Harper Finkle from Waverly Place."
"Oh…" Her acquaintance pointed with her wand to the dog. "Well, is that the witch?"
"No, this is my dog, Toto." Harper was living her favorite movie of all time, The Wizard of Oz, based on the book by Frank L. Baum. "I'm just looking for my friends." She turned back to the actress who played Glinda the Good Witch.
"Well, I'm a little muddled." Glinda looked around. "For you see, the Munchkins who live here in this valley have just told me that a very powerful witch just dropped a house on the Wicked Witch of the East. Well, there's the house…" She gestured to the farmhouse. "And there's all that exists of the Witch of the East." Harper looked over a bit more over and saw two feet from under the bedroom window wearing two ruby slippers. From here, Harper knew the entire movie and she was going to go through it scene by scene!
"So, I must ask, are you a good witch?" Glinda looked at her. "Or are you a bad witch?"
"But I'm not a witch…" Harper insisted and ran around coaxing out the Munchkins from their hiding places. "You can come out. You can all come out! I'm not going to hurt you. You're all safe!" She wanted to see them so much!
"Yes, that's right…" Glinda started coaxing them out too. "Come out, come out, from wherever you are, and meet the young lady who fell from a star…" A sort of music filled the land from the flowers, the skies and the ground. Along with this cosmic tune, the little folk known as the Munchkins came from their hiding places.
"Waverly Place she says is the name of that star." They chanted as they came from the gardens, from the houses, from the nooks in the houses, out of the trees, from the openings in the courtyard and the branches of the trees. Their little ones slept in giant flowerbeds in enormous pots. They all looked like little people, but they spoke in high especially embellished voices. There was a few dozen at first, then almost a hundred and they kept pouring further until there was almost a thousand. Their clothes were vaguely Dutch, expressed in vivid colors. No one stood taller than four feet high.
"She brings you good news, for haven't you heard, when she fell out of Waverly Place, a miracle occurred." Glinda added.
"It really was no miracle, what happened was just this…" Harper knew the lines perfectly from her youth. "The wind began to switch, the house to pitch and suddenly the hinges started to unhitch. The witch… to satisfy an itch, went flying on her broomstick looking for a hitch…"
"And ooooo… what happened then was rich!" One of the Munchkins jumped forward to repeat the story to his friend, and another repeated to his friend, and those friends were telling friends. Within moments, they were all chattering and talking in unison the same words building up to a crescendo. Harper loved it all as she held on to Toto. The Munchkins were freed from the witch's tyranny and they started bouncing excitedly, running around singing and dancing and honoring her with dances and decrees and busts of her likeness in the town hall. Glinda stood by enjoying the scene of happiness. Harper then realized what happened next in the movie and looked around nervously. There was a burst of smoke, like a small bomb going off and gray smoke filled the courtyard. The terrified Munchkins dropped and laid on their stomachs in fear, too afraid to get up as a woman with green skin and dark hair arrived. She was dressed entirely in a black turn of the century dress with a wide-brimmed cone hat. She waved a gnarly broom once and twice, looked around once and then advanced on her sister's feet under the house. She was Elmira, the Wicked Witch of the West, and worse than the first Witch. Harper felt like a small child to be before her in person.
"Who killed my sister?" She hissed over the spectacle she saw. "Who killed the Witch of the East?!" She demanded answers from the Munchkins then noticed Harper as a stranger to the land. "Was it you?!!!"
"No, no!!" Harper stood afraid of her, but she was in the presence of Glinda to protect her. "It was an accident!"
"Well, I can cause accidents too!!!"
"Aren't you forgetting the ruby slippers?" Glinda reminded her old rival.
"The slippers, yes!!!" Elmira turned round to collect her sister's shoes, but as she advanced on them, the shoes vanished. Without them, her sister's body started shriveling and wasting away into nothing until they no longer existed.
"They're gone!!!" Elmira screeched and turned back to Glinda. "What did you do to them? Give them back to me, or else I'll..."
"Too late!" Glinda pointed with her wand to Harper's feet. "There they are, and there they'll stay!" Harper gasped and looked down to her toes. She was wearing the shoes! This was her favorite part! She was actually doing it! She was getting to be Dorothy in the greatest movie in all of Hollywood history!
"They're much more comfortable than I thought!" Harper beamed smiling to Glinda.
"You give them back to me!" Elmira looked to Harper with her green eyes angry and venomous. "I'm the only one who understands their power."
"Keep tight inside them." Glinda whispered to Harper. "Their power must be very great if she wants them."
"You stay out of this, Glinda!" Elmira started reaching for Harper. "Give me those shoes or I'll…"
"Rubbish, you have no power here!" Glinda defended Harper. "Be gone before someone drops a house on you!!!" The witch suddenly cowered as if she heard the musical overture intoning her future. She looked to the skies and back sulking away.
"All right…" She crept and cowered away. "I'll bide my time. It's true I can't contend with you here and now as I like, but you better stay out of my way. You just try…" She lifted up her broom. "I'll get you my pretty… and your little dog too!!!" She started laughing with evil intent, smoke exploding from her cape and her body bursting into flame before exploding entirely. Around her, the Munchkins were cowering and crying in fear and once she was gone. Harper felt a pang of relief. There were few dangerous and scary moments in this movie, and this was one of them, and it was thankfully over.
"You can come out now. It's safe…" She called forth the terrified Munchkins. "What a smell of sulphur…" Glinda waved the air away from her face. "But I'm afraid you've made a very bad enemy of the Wicked Witch."
"Yeah…" Harper was eager to get started on her adventure as she set Toto down to the ground. "I guess I better get going if I'm going to see the Wizard in Emerald City. He can send me home, right?"
"Why that's correct!" Glinda was amazed by how much she knew. "You must be a witch after all!"
"Not really…" Harper lit up smiling again. "I just happen to know a few wizards."
"Then Harper…" Glinda started floating away. "You know exactly what to do from here. Just follow the yellow brick road…."
"The yellow brick road…" Harper started looking at her feet for the start of it. When she looked up, Glinda was a bubble of light drifting up into the sky and into the hills and countryside, around the cliffs and ravines and floating off to the North. When Harper turned round, she found the tip of the road at her feet and started flowing it around the spiral of the courtyard.
"I'm following the yellow brick road!!" She cheered excitedly.
"Follow the yellow brick road." The short portly Munchkin mayor pointed her in the right direction.
"Follow the yellow brick road." One of the Munchkins from the Lollypop Guild guided her with his gravely road.
"Follow the yellow brick road." A female Munchkin stepped forward to remind her.
"Follow the yellow brick road." Another male Munchkin spoke in a goofy voice. They were now chanting it over and over to a crescendo pitch building into the song. Harper was skipping and dancing toward the city gates past the old farmhouse and dozens of Munchkins singing and dancing with her to the town limits.
"You're off to see the Wizard… the wonderful Wizard of Oz…" Their high, squeaky helium-filled voices were cheering her way on her adventure.
"Boy, you guys really like to sing and dance!!!" Harper waved her hand to them to say goodbye one last time. The closer she chased after the landscape around her, the more it started to turn into the real thing. It was unfolding and unfurling into the most beautiful valley of hills and countryside and woods she had ever seen and somewhere far before her, she knew Justin, Max and Harper would be around to help her against the Wicked Witch.
At that time, the Witch was exploding from smoke into her castle beyond the Black Forest on Superstition Mountain, but as she reappeared, she was shorter than before, her hat and dark cloak smaller to fit her frame. She was laughing and cackling, rushing toward her tables and shelves of powders and potions. Amidst her cackling, she coughed a bit and started pounding on her chest to catch her breath. Her throat felt raspy. Her voice sounded odd.
"What the heck am I laughing at?" She asked herself. "My hands! My hands are green!!!" She pulled her hat off and unfurled her long dark hair from the bun it was tied up in on her head. Her brown eyes looked and peered around the room as if she was just now discovering it.
"This isn't the chocolate factory!!!" Alex Russo started realizing she was in the wrong movie. "Who am I? Where am I? Why are my hands green?" She started looking for a mirror. She wanted to know if her face was green, but as she reached to her face, she realized her nose was a more pointy than normal and her chin was longer. Just starting to freak out, she began crying at how grotesque she had become. All she had was a brass plate, but it could barely give her a decent reflection. Her face was green too, but she could barely see her own brown eyes. Who was she? What movie was this?
"Justin, I'm going to kill you!!!" She realized she had a wand. It wasn't hers, but it would do. "Literary Hollywood Terrarium!" She chanted. "Literary Hollywood Terrarium!" Nothing was happening. "Justin!!!!" She screamed. "If I'm a vampire again, I'm going to vomit!!!"