Before I go to see Wicked
Before I go to see Wicked I need to say some things about Wicked.
What happened was my wife wanted to go see Wicked the musical. This was in 2009. Of course I liked the Wizard of Oz film well enough as a kid but she really liked the Wizard of Oz film. All I knew about Wicked was something I'd seen on an audition show for the Dorothys - you remember Graham Norton did a whole bunch of audition shows? "You're not Joseph" etc - which did Popular as a duet. Popular is not, in fact, a duet.
Also, this advert which I liked because "Use a scoop" has long-suffering wife vibes.
I'm not a musical theatre gay so I did not want to go see Wicked the musical. As part of the campaign she bought me Wicked the book. I did not read it.
Flash forward to the summer of 2011. We were deep in Hand aufs Herz. Half of the reason the entire wlw internet was all over HaH had played Glinda in the German Wicked the musical. I picked up the book.
And promptly lost my shit.
I fell for that book so hard.
It's probably my favourite book. I know that thing forwards and backwards. It fundamentally changed my writing. It fundamentally changed me. I have written (to date, I am not ruling out more) nine stories, totalling 198k.
My wife's plan backfired spectacularly. I loved it so much I refused to go see the musical for another two years.
When I did see the musical I did it in style, with the legendary Willemijn Verkaik as Elphaba. Which also tied nicely back into the Hand aufs Herz origin. I'm bookverse all the way and have approximately 198k bones to pick with that musical.
Now, obviously, the film is an adaptation of the musical. I came out of the first one saying, "Awful, bizarre, confounding thing. When can we see it again?"
Instead of grumbling about the musical let's talk about some of my favourite words from Gregory Maguire's Wicked. As an excuse to reread huge chunks and also as practice talking about these things. Wicked is my favourite book in no small part because of the language. Archaic and rich. Also it's just so funny and dark and layered.
This contains, obviously, spoilers for Gregory Maguire's Wicked. And obnoxiously large quotes. Sorry not sorry.
Starting with baby Elphaba.
Elphaba, on all fours, advanced on the uneven planks of the flooring. She bared her teeth - as if she knew what a dragon was, as if she were pretending - and roared. Her green skin made her more persuasive, as if she were a dragon child. She roared again - 'Oh sweetheart, don't,' said Frex, and she peed on the floor, and sniffed her urine with satisfaction and disgust.
One day I want to be able to Grammar like that.
Also from earlier in the book, the ellipses are where I've cut Elphaba's mother complaining about her husband and boyfriend:
‘Darling, no rocks,’ shrilled Nanny. ‘None of the other children have rocks.’
‘Now they do,’ observed Gawnette.
...
‘Now there’s blood, how vexing,’ said Nanny. ‘Children, let Elphie up so I can wipe that cut. And I didn’t bring a rag. Gawnette?’ ‘Bleeding is good for them, makes them less hungry,’ said Gawnette.
...
‘No biting,’ said Gawnette to one of the little boys, and then, seeing Elphaba open her mouth to retaliate, raised herself to her feet, bad hip or no, and screamed, ‘no biting, for the love of mercy!’
‘Aren’t children divine?’ said Nanny.
The Shiz section (favourite) is split between Glinda and Boq. (Elphaba isn't the POV character in her own story until really late.)
‘You’re fun to look at,’ decided Galinda.
Boq’s face fell. ‘Fun?’ he said.
‘I’d give a lot to achieve fun,’ Elphaba said. ‘The best I usually hope for is stirring, and when people say that they’re usually referring to digestion—’
And Glinda is without doubt my favourite character, the awful creature:
Elphaba looked like something between an animal and an Animal, like something more than life but not quite Life. There was an expectancy but no intuition, was that it? – like a child who has never remembered having a dream being told to have sweet dreams. You’d almost call it unrefined, but not in a social sense – more in a sense of nature not having done its full job with Elphaba, not quite having managed to make her enough like herself.
‘Oh, put the damn hat on, really,’ said Galinda, for whom, where introspection was concerned, enough was enough.
What is this feeling? Got nothing on this.
Glinda didn’t really lose consciousness, but the uncomfortable physical nearness of hawk-faced Elphaba after that undesired act of desire made her want to shiver with revulsion and to purr at the same time. ‘Steady on, girl, not here,’ said Elphaba, ‘resist, come on!’ Resist was just what Glinda didn’t want to do. But after all, in the shadow of an apple cart, on the edge of the market where merchants were selling the last fish of the day, cheap, well, this was hardly the place. ‘Tough, tough skin,’ said Elphaba, appearing to pull words from the back of her throat. ‘Come on, Glinda – you’ve got better brains – come on! I love you too much, snap out of it, you idiot!’
‘Well, really,’ she said as Elphaba dumped her on a heap of moldy packing straw. ‘No need to be so romantic about it!’ But she felt better, as if a wave of illness had just passed.
My contention is, has always been, that Glinda is attempting to kiss Elphaba in this passage. I'm not going to put in one of my favourite passages because it really is too much in the way of spoilers but is very relevant here.
For when she chose to remember her youth at all, she could scarcely dredge up an ounce of recollection about that daring meeting with the Wizard. She could recall far more clearly how she and Elphie had shared a bed on the road to the Emerald City. How brave that had made her feel, and how vulnerable too.