A Confession.

There are those times in your life where you have to just stand up, make an unpopular declaration, and ultimately deal with the consequences. Whether they be the loss of friends, declining respect from your peers, or a swift dismissal out of the race, sometimes it’s for the greater good and for one’s own sanity.

I learned something last week. Something really really really bad.

–The Wiz is The Worst Movie Ever–

Up until last week, I thought I loved the Wiz. I mean, on the surface, it has all of the necessary pieces needed for a classic guilty pleasure: Nipsy Russell, a Black spinoff of a classic work (think “Carmen: a Hip-Hopera”), and Diana Ross looking like Huey Newton.

I mean, I knew all the words to “Ease on Down the Road”

Even though Stephanie Mills sang it better, I love the song “Home”

I didn’t even have a problem with the 67-minute bonanza that is “Brand New Day.”

What I figured out, however, is that I discovered all of these isolated aspects of The Wiz at different points of my life. I never had sat down and watched The Wiz in one fail swoop, surrounded by my closest loved-ones.

Then last week happened. Leave it to BET holiday programming to ruin a family, because that’s exactly what happened. I sat down, at first passively watching and listening to The Wiz because, in all honesty, I thought I knew the movie inside and out. But, every now and then, I would hear something that made no sense, see something that had nothing to do with the plot, and quickly began to notice the costumes that more resembled my failed 4th grade paper-mache Volcano experiment than an costume for a big-budget film.

I eventually put down everything and stared at this catastrophe of a film. I looked over to my mother, my aunt, my cousin, and my great aunt to see if they were seeing the same horrible movie that I was witnessing. Their facial expressions mirrored mine and something became very clear to me at that moment–

We were the FIRST group of people to ever watch The Wiz from beginning to end.

You (reader) think you have, because you know how it starts, what happened in the middle, and how it ends, but you have not seen this movie from start to finish in one sitting. I promise.

If people had done this, the movie would not even be available in stores, shown on television, or even mentioned. I think it gave me scurvy. It made me physically ill. The members of my family were looking at each other, wondering if someone had slipped something in our drinks. It was not a good scene.

Once the Wiz was over, no one even spoke to anyone. We were confused, upset, and mostly betrayed. We just looked at each other, I turned off the TV, and then everyone just closed their eyes and went to sleep.

Fast forward to present day, no one has mentioned it.  Everyone has a different alibi about what they did that night, but no one is admitting to watching that mess. My mom says that she was “at the mall with friends”, my aunt, cousin and great-aunt claim to have been “shooting hoops in the front yard”, And my little 5-year old cousin swears he was “at a teen club, with his boo.”

Don’t ever watch this movie. You and your family will never be the same. I can’t figure it out just yet, but I know this is all your fault.