I heard something on the radio about the scheduling of this event. This must be a quick recovery gimmick after the theft of the Ruby Slippers. They went missing some weeks prior to this event.

Here's a bit from an article you'll find via Google News

No sign of ruby slippers stolen from museum
MEMORABILIA: The theft of the famous shoes from "The Wizard of Oz" draws attention to Judy Garland's birthplace.

BY JIM RAGSDALE, ST. PAUL PIONEER PRESS

GRAND RAPIDS - Shane Troumbley, who tests paper products by day and acts in "The Wizard of Oz" by night, was supposed to tell the Emerald City gatekeeper that Dorothy's ruby slippers were proof that she should be admitted to see the great and powerful wizard.

But during a rehearsal last week, Troumbley couldn't resist ad-libbing.

"She's wearing the ruby slippers we stole from the museum!" he said.

Art imitated life this week in Grand Rapids, a paper-making, hunting and fishing community along the upper Mississippi where the poplars and maples are in full color and Glen's Army Navy Outdoors store was busy with men with grouse or deer in their sights.

Troumbley's quip on the stage of the Reif Center, a showplace where a community production of Oz is being mounted, was a reminder of Grand Rapids' claim to artistic fame.

And infamy.

He referred to the bold, shocking and inexplicable theft of one of the few known pairs of the sequined ruby slippers used in 1939's "The Wizard of Oz" film. The famed pumps, on loan to the Judy Garland Museum, insured for $1 million and possibly worth far more in an open auction, disappeared from their plexiglass display case six weeks ago during an overnight break-in.

Grand Rapids is the birthplace of Frances Ethel Gumm, a musical prodigy who became a film and musical phenomenon under her stage name of Judy Garland. Gumm-Garland will forever be Dorothy, the role she played in the Wizard of Oz film, long after she and her family had left Grand Rapids for Hollywood.

She lived in Grand Rapids less than five years and returned exactly once, on a snowy March day in 1938 that some locals still remember. That didn't keep modern-day Garland fans from moving and restoring her birthplace, filling two museums with memorabilia and hosting an annual festival that draws serious Garland and Oz worshippers from places like California, England and Australia.

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