An old photo of Russ, our former roommate Megan, and me being goofy together
My husband Russ and I saw the Wicked movie last night. The feelings it brought up in me are astounding. I have so much to say about it.
I thought about writing a blog post about “my things”. I think this may be an autistic quality of mine, that I find certain types of art or entertainment to be incredibly personal and resonant with me, and have a hard time understanding that those things resonate with other people. For the longest time when I was growing up, I would be shocked every time someone else told me that they too loved the X-Men, which a part of me always felt was made just for me and my experience and my feelings. My official autism diagnosis report mentioned my love for the band Paramore, and I have always felt that Paramore’s music touched me deeply and personally and was made just for me, and again have always been shocked when other people say they love the band and their music. And Wicked - the stage production and the original Broadway cast recording - always felt like a deeply personal thing, like one of “my things”, and with this movie coming out, I have this sense of incredible surprise that so many people feel the same way about it that I do.
Instead, I’m choosing to write a blog post about a lyric in the song “Defying Gravity”. The lyric goes, “Too long I’ve been afraid of / Losing love I guess I’ve lost / Well, if that’s love, it comes at much too high a cost”. I remember the first time listening to the Broadway cast recording and hearing that line, and feeling this gut reaction to how it felt, like that line had been ripped from my journal.
The original Broadway cast recording came out in 2003, the year that the people in my life found out about my queerness and reacted the way they did. I wrote a lot about this in my last post, this feeling that, no matter how much I tried to be the “right” kind of person, the world was going to reject me for who I was. When I heard that line, the feelings of frustration and validation about how futile my efforts to be the “right” kind of person were - and how trying to be that person did too much damage to me - really struck me deeply. In 2003/2004, this idea that I wasn’t going to try to be what I was “supposed to” be and was instead going to live my truth - the way the song “Defying Gravity” inspired me to at the time - made such a profound impact.
Now, in 2024, that lyric hits in a very similar and yet distinct way. (I’m coming to realize that this post is mostly just a continuation of the last post, but bear with me.) In the last couple years, I’ve come to embrace myself as a genderqueer/non-binary person, I’ve come to understand myself as a neurodivergent (both ADHD and autism, or AuDHD) person, and I’ve come to understand how essential healthy boundaries are. And yet I’ve been holding on to that pull to be “acceptable” or “palatable”, and having a hard time acknowledging that living authentically, unmasked, and true to myself necessarily means that there are people who are going to reject me and cut me out of their lives.
In a very personal way, the lyric speaks to a situation that’s going on in my family, and my coming to understand that being cast as the villain in someone else’s story is worth the peace it brings me to no longer have to contort myself to fit their image of me.
In the context of being an American, the lyric … gosh, the lyric holds such power. This idea that I was going to somehow be appealing to “moderate Americans” or “moderate conservatives” while simultaneously living authentically was just nonsense. And again, contorting myself to fit into the “acceptable” version of me (that really wasn’t me at all) so that I could be accepted by closed-minded people … it was too high a cost. This election showed me that there is no degree of “different” that will be accepted by hateful people. If my being even a little different - what I perceived to be an acceptable level of different - is going to result in me being rejected and going to result in profound threats to my rights, then fuck it, I’m going to stop trying to be the “acceptable level of different” and allow myself to be myself in all of my full differentness.
I am glad I approached seeing the Wicked movie the way I did. The original Broadway cast recording was something that Russ and I sang along to all the time with our roommate Megan when we lived in Boston. I already wrote about how deeply personal that recording was, but I also had tons of memories attached to it of how much love was in our little family - Russ, Megan, and I. (Russ and I still very much love Megan, by the way, but she still lives in Massachusetts and we certainly don’t talk to her as often as we did.) Because of my attachment to that recording, I was really nervous that I wouldn’t be receptive to the movie’s cast and recording. I watched a bunch of interviews with the two leads - Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande - but I didn’t watch any behind-the-scenes clips of the movie or see any footage from it except for what was in the trailer. I chose not to listen to the movie cast recording and instead wait to hear their versions until I saw the movie itself.
The movie is ASTOUNDING. I remember listening to the original Broadway recording and thinking “I really hope they make a movie of this some day”, but then when they announced that the movie was happening, I was so nervous it wouldn’t live up to its potential. Instead, the movie blew my expectations out of the water. The way the actors’ voices work on these songs is … it’s just beyond what I could have hoped. The performances, the choices in expressions and phrasing, the choice to have actual live sets instead of doing all CGI, the actors’ choice to sing everything live while they were filming … it’s just all perfect. It is everything I could have hoped a Wicked movie to be and more. I have not stopped listening to the movie cast recording since leaving the theater yesterday. I have yet to listen to the movie’s version of “Defying Gravity” without crying, and I am NOT a crier normally. Russ had to not talk for a while as we were leaving the theater and walking through the mall that the theater is attached to because he felt like, if he opened his mouth, he was going to start sobbing in public. I have never been this moved by a movie. The only other time I can remember being this moved by a form of entertainment was the first time I saw Wicked on stage.
Thinking of how much love was in the family pictured at the top of this post, how the Broadway soundtrack to Wicked was something we loved together as a unit, how excited we’ve been to group text about the movie with Megan, and the lyric that inspired this post … it just makes it all the clearer how essential it is to invest my love and energy in the people who truly do love the authentic me. It also makes it clear how important it is to not pay the painful cost of being afraid of losing love that isn’t keepable, or even worth keeping. I’ve been spending a lot of time since the election investing my energy in the truly precious people in my life. I’ve also reconnected with a few people who I had lost touch with, who are already becoming essential parts of my chosen family, the family that needs to come together as we face where things are headed. I’ve made plans to bring together the people who most love the most authentic me in September of next year. This is the time to build and strengthen community.
If you haven’t seen the Wicked movie, PLEASE go see it. Be prepared to cry. And maybe avoid watching footage from the movie before seeing it, because experiencing it all for the first time in the theater was incredible.