Be a Bust!

Poets David Trinidad, Jeffery Conway, and Lynn Crosbie collaborated on Phoebe 2002, an epic exploring All About Eve (the 1950 movie starring Bette Davis). At nearly 650 pages, including notes, it's a commitment, but full of Hollywood detail. Wizard comes in for a mention:

In the film The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy defeats

(read: drops her house on) the Wicked Witch, the Munchkins

celebrate her by singing, ‘You will be a bust, be a bust, be a bust

in the Hall of Fame.’

*

I remember the line. But I don’t remember understanding what the Munchkin was really saying. Maybe it was that I didn’t hear the words clearly. I often have trouble picking the words out of sung lyrics. Besides, the Munchkins’ singing voices are tweaked a little higher than normal, or sped up slightly? But once I did get the words, they didn’t mean much. After all, there’s a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a Baseball Hall of Fame … why wouldn’t there be an Oz Hall of Fame? 

The poets of Phoebe 2002 help us out:

[T]he first [Hall of Fame] was located

in the Bronx and originally belonged to New York University. Its official

name was the Hall of Fame for Great Americans. The Hall opened in 1901

with 29 inductees, among them the first and only unanimously elected member,

George Washington. Others that first year included Benjamin Franklin,

Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee,

David Glasgow Farragut, Gilbert Charles Stewart, Peter Cooper,

Henry Ward Beecher, Horace Mann, Ralph Waldo Emerson,

Washington Irving, Supreme Court Justice John Marshall,

Ulysses S. Grant, John James Audubon, and Eli Whitney.

That group illustrated the range of professions acknowledged

and also brought the first but enduring charges that the electors

were elitists. No women, Americans of color, or sports figures

were included, a lapse soon remedied by a few token additions,

for all but sports heroes. The last year of elections to the Hall

was 1976, after which the program was abandoned for want

of funds and, probably, interest. That explains why the Hall is

unknown to so many … especially those under 50. 

Even now, bronze busts of four of the 102 honorees are not

in place, there having been no money for the sculptures.

*

Who are David Glasgow Farragut, Gilbert Charles Stewart, and Peter Cooper? Never heard of ‘em. Perhaps the poet didn’t know them either, so grouped the obscurities together. Fame is fickle. 

source: Phoebe 2002: an essay in verse

Jeffery Conway, Lynn Crosbie, David Trinidad

2003. Turtle Point Press, New York