So has there been recent relief that Oz has provided you with personally with the prequels?

Well, it's very interesting, and I will be honest with you about this, um, because I'm basically honest all the time.

Um, when I wrote Elphie, uh, two, two and a half years ago, whenever it was, uh, I wrote it because I had begun to realize with the release of the movies that I really had created something in popular culture that was going to long outlive me, in the same way that Neverland and Oz have outlived the people who invented them, charted them, discovered them, and gave them to us.

My version of Wicked, it's not the last version, and it's not the best version, but it is a version that is gonna have some staying power after, um, I go off to see the wizard for the last time.

And, uh, I began to be aware that somebody, just as they had done young Frankenstein, and young Sherlock Holmes, and you know, I don't know, young Stalin, um, somebody was gonna do a young Elphie, because I didn't say very much about her in the published book of Wicked.

Now, as I think you know, Tara and MK, I had written something about the, those middle years of Elphaba growing up in between the ages of 3 and 16, let's say.

But I'd had to drop those on the cutting room floor because the book was too long to begin with.

Yeah.

This is news.

This is news.

And Harper came back to me and said, yes, we would love it.

We will give you a two book contract.

And the first book has to be called Galinda.

And I thought, well, Harper isn't the devil, so I'm not selling my soul to the devil.

In fact, as a former Catholic schoolboy, if I get an assignment on Friday, I do it so I can turn it in on Monday morning on time and don't get marked off for late grades.

I thought, does he read? I don't know the answer to that.

Can you tell us a little bit about your early life, which began amidst some tragic circumstances?

Yes, I will tell you about that.

I was born in 54, so that's 71 years ago, and I was the fourth child of a rather poor couple, a Greek immigrant mother and an Irish second-generation immigrant father.

And when I was born, my mother died.

She died in childbirth, in fact, something that doesn't happen very often and everybody thinks went out in the 19th century, but it didn't.

My father was unemployed and ill, so he gave up his four children, surrendered them to the four living sisters of his dead wife.

I went for a few months to one of my aunts when I was a small infant, but she got pregnant.

Singing