A highlight of my ‘80s-scented hill-folk childhood was fantasies about girls doing rad magical stuff. This was a nigh forbidden interest for a boy growing up in fundamentalist backwater Ohio, but that made it all the sweeter. Girls who solved their own problems, like Jem and the Holograms or She-Ra or Sailor Moon. Girls who glowed like fireflies and overcame all odds in clouds of pink and purple sparkles, unselfconscious of how girly and attention-grabbing this was.
But before any of them, there was Dorothy Gale.