Midget Sex Parties

I'm not sure which tells you more about how my upbringing influenced my state of mind:
a) my mom found this in the newspaper and thought it'd interest me, or
b) it does and I'm posting it.

Whichever, welcome to my world:

If you've ever seen the movie Trainspotting then you've got a pretty good idea of the state of mind of writer Irving Welsh. In fact, if you wanna know the truth, that novel might be one of his tamer works (check out Filth if you don't believe me). Well, most recently, Mr. Welsh has turned his attention to a subject near and dear my heart, as he explains in the following article:

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They looked the picture of innocence. But behind the scenes of TheWizard of Oz, the actors playing the munchkins were said to be indulging in drunken orgies. Now Irvine Welsh has turned their story into a play - and sparked a storm.

Thursday July 20, 2006 The Guardian

Babylon Heights, the play, focuses on the performers in The Wizard of Oz, people who were arriving in Hollywood for the first time, intent on realising their dreams. Los Angeles is still packed with hopefuls waiting tables and valeting cars. Few will make it, but the allure is always present, perhaps now more than ever. From our perspective, this was where the most compelling drama lay.

We decided that Babylon would be about the "little people" of Oz, the munchkin performers. There is an old myth that in the film's original print, during the Tin Woodsman scene, the small shadowed figure you can see is actually a dead munchkin hanging from a tree. The official line was that it was a dead bird. Our starting point was to take this myth as a reality.

Babylon Height's munchkins are all self-reliant people, using their own devices to get through a very grim and desperate period in their lives. One of them is a pretentious but proud thespian who defeats a strong man in physical combat, another is a drug addict wiseguy with a heart of gold, yet another is an idealistic dreamer with green fingers.

During filming, Judy Garland and Wizard of Oz producer Mervyn Le Roy commented on "dwarf sex parties" and "orgies and drunkenness" among the munchkin actors. Well, what else were they supposed to do? The small people, billeted separately from the other performers, were under de facto house arrest in their Culver City hotel. They were taken from there directly on to the studio set, and then taken straight back. The actors have since claimed, in accounts of that period and biographies, to have been paid far less than the other actors, even less than the dog playing Toto.

The munchkin actors were largely young people, many of them away from home for the first time and thrown together in a pressure-cooker environment. The fact that they happened to be of restricted growth is almost irrelevant. They did what they did, which in the case of the play is what we imagined most people in that position would do. What we see in Babylon Heights are human beings in a state of relative powerlessness, trying to cope as best they can.

We decided not to use persons of restricted growth as actors.
Instead, we opted to deploy regular-sized performers and outsized furnishings and fittings. This was the hardest call, and it took a lot of soul-searching. But we decided we didn't want to have a situation whereby sensationalist elements of the media might portray the experience as a bunch of "normal-sized" people sitting in a theatre watching "dwarfs" perform. Crucially, we wanted the audience to feel empathy with the performers, to feel that they, too, were small and locked into an outsized, inhospitable space with larger, often menacing figures lurking outside.

The play resolutely attacks the spirit of discrimination, including the type actively practised by the studio at the time. It does this not by painting the characters as perfect and virtuous, but by making them real people. We have assumed that they have a sexuality, are influenced by carnal needs and experience the drives common to most human beings. I have yet to see any dramatic representations of persons of restricted growth that acknowledges this very basic fact.
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As far as I can tell it is still only playing in Dublin and San Francisco. So, until it hits the road, I guess those of us not living in these midget hotbeds will have to survive watching and re-watching the 1981 film Under The Rainbow starring Chevy Chase and Billy Barty.