For Good: What Wicked Reminds Us About Female Friendship

This weekend, I took my 7-year-old Wicked-obsessed daughter to see Wicked: For Good, and it was a magical experience (pun very much intended). Longtime readers know I was a full-blown theater kid, the kind who lived for cast recordings and has collected over 50 playbills since high school. So watching both Wicked movies with my daughter — and with my best friend and her daughter — felt like witnessing a core memory in real time.

And the movie did not disappoint. 

I don’t think there was a dry eye in the theater when Glinda and Elphaba (or really, Ari and Cynthia) sang “For Good.” And that final shot with the nod to the original show poster? Jon M. Chu, you win. I can die happy now.

What struck me most, though, was how quickly it transported me back to the girl I was before I became a wife and mom: the girl who loved stories, dreamed big, and didn’t apologize for being dramatic in all the best ways. There’s something about being in your late 30s that makes you want to revisit those early passions — not in a midlife-crisis way, but in a “Wait, that’s still me” kind of way.

And Wicked, for so many of us, was never just a musical. It was an introduction to the idea that female friendship can be messy and transformative. That you can be ambitious and complicated and not always likable... and still be deeply loved. That the people who challenge you aren’t necessarily holding you back; sometimes they’re the ones pushing you forward.

Watching my daughter take it all in reminded me how rare it is to see stories that center on that kind of connection without making it a subplot. Wicked lets women be the whole story, flaws, flying monkeys, and all.