Back in 1997, during my junior year of college, I thought I was done with The Wizard of Oz.
I was, we can say, not correct.
It all started innocently enough.
You know, the roommate with the ponytail who smokes too much weed and insists all must watch The Wizard of Oz—while listening to Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, of course.
(If my parents and/or kids are reading this, I did not partake.)
Anyway, 1997 is the same year I met the to-be wife and—as she’ll reluctantly corroborate—also the point when I embarked on a lifelong journey of maturity. In other words, there was little time for children’s books or their film adaptations.
The knot was formally tied in 2004, and we landed in New York City, where I initially sought to prove to the spouse that she had made an applaudable matrimonial decision. (As she’ll willingly corroborate, such efforts have since diminished dramatically.)
In any event, part of living in the Big Apple involves feigning importance by embracing groupthink. As such, I bought two tickets to Wicked, the stage adaptation of a 1995 novel that expounds on Oz‘s all-important witches.
I don’t recall much about the performance aside from some green lady and a sense of freedom when the thing was over.
And that’s when, again, I thought I was done with The Wizard of Oz.
But the plan really began to derail in 2010 when, about two centuries too late, I searched for opportunity on the Erie Canal. Along with this questionable decision came a questionable obsession, at least as judged by future book sales.
But I’m jumping ahead.
As part of this Upstate New York obsession, I learned that L. Frank Baum was from Chittenango, just east of Syracuse. He’s the dude who wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, first published in 1900 and later turned into the 1939 flick with the slightly shorter name.
That piece of trivia led me to Matilda Joslyn Gage, Baum’s mother-in-law. Gage spent much of her life in nearby Fayetteville, influencing the likes of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and blossoming into a veritable social justice warrior. Women’s rights, Indigenous rights, and abolitionism—she took on all of them.
Along the way, she encouraged her son-in-law’s writing career and plausibly inspired his tendency to create strong female characters.
She herself was known to write a thing or two, including Woman as an Inventor, in which she detailed the pervasive bias against and dismissal of female inventors.
Over a hundred years later, historian Margaret W. Rossiter applied the same concept to scientific research, describing a systematic failure to acknowledge the contributions of women scientists, which she termed the Matilda Effect.
Without realizing it at first, I had officially fallen deep into a rabbit hole.
And by 2025, there was absolutely no end in sight.
There was the teenage daughter, as in the one with a penchant for live theater. That meant season tickets at the Auditorium Theatre in Rochester to see Hamilton, & Juliet, and…Wicked. (This was, needless to say, well after a visit to the Susan B. Anthony House.)
Then there was a football Sunday spent watching Wicked: Part I, a cinematic take on the musical. That project was simply to prepare for part two, aka Wicked: For Good.
I learned that the name Elphaba, that of the wicked witch of the west, came from the initials of L. Frank Baum.
No longer capable of fighting gravity, I decided to buy a paperback copy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
In the back, I learned that Baum had actually written a total of 14 books in the series, the one I bought being just the first.
After his death, his publisher commissioned another author, Ruth Plumly Thompson, to write 19 more.
Other authors added another seven, amounting to the “Famous Forty.”
Then came even more, including, um, Wicked.
Finally understanding the extent of my screwdom, I took to writing a blog post.
Note:
If anyone is available, in 2026, I plan on visiting the All Things Oz Museum in Chittenango. That day trip will be coordinated with an annual festival called Oz-Stravaganza. On the way back, I’ll stop by a house turned museum in Fayetteville—a Gage and a Baum used to live there.
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