Last week I finished the book and have joined the ranks of never looking at Wicked Witch of the West the same way again. Oz is so much more political & complicated than I grew up to believe!

Up until last week, Oz had been a simple place where animals and plants could talk and sing.

Wicked provided me an opportunity to reconsider Oz in a much more sophisticated light!

AND now I know that the Witch is probably half elf and wanted the ruby slippers for very senitmental reasons as well as political. Dorothy is so naive', more so than even in the movie.

I remember the early seventies when I was around five or six years old. We had a small black & white tv shared by everyone in our home. Wizard of Oz would come on once a year, and it was a big deal at our house!

It was before they took the time to color every frame of the Oz world, so the whole thing was still in black & white.

Years later in college while earning my Child Development degree, I chose the assignment to create a fantasy play area in a pre school. Guess what I chose to make? Yep.

I crafted a big 'hot air balloon' for the room and brought in Oz styled costumes for the children to role play in. At the time I didn't consider that Glinda the 'Good' Witch had been a college roomie of the Wicked Witch way back 'in the day'. Or that the Wicked Witch's sister had been born with no arms and needed the slippers for power and balance. Charmed by Glinda herself.

I also hadn't known that the Lion had been saved by the Wicked Witch during a college class when the professor who did NOT like Animals (that's animals with a capital 'A' who can talk like humans, not to be confused with animals with a lower case 'a' who cannot talk) - well, he was going to torture the poor baby Animal and she stopped him.

See, Alphie loved Animals and was a big activist in the movement. It was SHE who lovingly sewed all those wings on the monkeys so they could fly and get Dorothy and Toto for a visit to the castle.

Who would have KNOWN?

And the images from this book of the Wicked Witch with a beautiful lover, a PRINCE no less. They enjoy an intellectual affair with hot chemistry. She feels such guilt over her political choices which then lead her to do things she later does with Dorothy and the others.

Poor Wicked Witch. She wasn't born WANTING to be a wicked. She couldn't help having saw tooth teeth that bit off her midwife's finger at the tender age of day ONE!

Her skin is green and she has a narrow jaw, this makes everyone place her automatically assume she's both wicked and a witch!

Allergic to water, it stings her to feel it.

Okay.

And the Wizard is an idiot in power.  No problem with this image.

I think I'll go see the play and root for poor Alphie to get those ruby shoes from Dorothy . . . 

So the Wizard can't get a hold of them. He wants to control Munchkinland and since the Wicked Witch's sister was Witch in Munchkinland, those shoes would come in handy to a dictator ; then he could totally snuff out the Animal rights movement!

Wicked Witch wanted to save the Animals. Who would have thought?

Light!

Fawn