What’s in a Name?
I wrote this entry for my book, Theatre Is My Life! for yesterday, August 11. So read it as if it were yesterday, and all will be fine!
Blog 58
“It's Galinda, with a GA.”
Galinda in Wicked: The Untold Story of the Witches of Oz, with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz and book by Winnie Holzman, based on the novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire
Today (August 11) is my daughter’s birthday. Last night was a full moon, just like the year she was born. She was to be induced on August 10, but my obstetrician’s office called me at 4:00 a.m. on the appointed date and said I had to wait until the 11th. A full moon had flooded the delivery rooms at the hospital and there were new mothers living on beds in the hallways because the place was so crowded.
I did not know the gender of my baby until she was born. But I thought she was a girl and a couple of months before her birth, I realized that the names I was considering really didn’t fit her: Catherine Bowron or Ada Barrett. I searched a number of baby name books in the library (long before the days of the internet), and I discovered a lovely Swedish and Welsh-Irish version of Ellen or Helen, names of which ran in the family. So we decided on Elin and Keith (which was my mother’s middle name).
At the time, I didn’t realize the name was fairly rare, and people never could get it quite right. From the time she could speak, when people asked her name, she would say, “It’s Elin. (then spelling) E-L-I-N. Elin.” Growing up in the theatre at Samford University, she has always loved musicals, so we went to see Wicked the first time it came to Birmingham.
Wicked: The Untold Story of the Witches of Oz was a smash hit on Broadway by the inimitable Stephen Schwartz. It is based on Maguire’s novel that parallels some of the fictional history of L. Frank Baum's 1900 archetypal story, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Elin and I went to see Wicked during a Broadway tour to Birmingham while she was pregnant with her daughter Emmeline, named for my great-great-grandfather’s sister (and containing her mother’s name within her own!).
The musical Wicked, streamlined and changed from the novel, reveals the backstories of the Oz witches, both before and after Dorothy’s arrival in their fair country. In Wicked, Galinda, later Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, and Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, are unlikely pals who nevertheless struggle constantly because of their antithetical personalities.
Wicked jumbles up these two characters. Though we recall from the story that Glinda is “good” and the Wicked Witch of the West is “bad,” in this musical, they are far from being diametrically opposed or dualistically simple. The Wicked Witch is given the moniker Elphaba and at first despises the popular Galinda, but as the one-dimensional Galinda makes a crucial shift in identity, the two become more connected friends.
“It's Galinda, with a GA,” she says early in the musical. But her growth is later symbolized by the removal of the “A,” and she remarks, “It's Glinda, the GA is silent.” (Yes, she is still a blonde.)
Names mean something, and names can shape your path. The novelist Maguire formulated the name “Elphaba" using the phonetic pronunciation of the initials L. Frank Baum. So, L.F.B became El-pha-ba. Baum surely knew that the name “Glinda” actually means “fair or good.” “Elin” means “light” and “Keith” means “from the battlefield,” so I suppose being armed to withstand the struggles of life with a gleaming brilliance give her a fine way to cope with people who (still) question her name.