Lectures For Lifelong Learners!

The Wizard of Oz, the classic 1939 film, was based in an early 20th century book series by L. Frank Baum. It tells a classic initiatory story featuring a girl who travels to another world “over the rainbow,” good and wicked witches, dandy lions, and a fraudulent wizard. But it’s not just about a girl coming of age: A grown-up take finds that the tale is one of powerful women, gay friends, and the power of green nature. Gregory Maguire’s novel Wicked (1990), now a blockbuster film, makes these themes more explicit, as the green Witch is now the hero, Glinda her ally, the wizard an authoritarian bully, and leading readers and viewers led to complex moral questioning of those who claim to represent “the good.”