When the character of Fiyero, who is the love interest of both the female leads, Elpheba who ultimately becomes the Wicked Witch of the West, and Glinda, who becomes Glinda the Good, ends up in trouble, when the Wizard of Oz's guards take him out into the fields to 'hang him up like a scarecrow' and well, bash him to smithereens, Elpheba uses her magic powers to transform Fiyero into a scarecrow so that he won't feel pain and suffer. While she is casting the spell she sings:
'Let his flesh not be torn/Let his blood leave no stain/Though they beat him/Let him feel no pain/Let his bones never break/And however they try/To destroy him/Let him never die/Let him never die. The spell worked and Fiyero becomes a scarecrow and so cannot feel the pain as he is bashed.
The scarecrow imagery and the irony of those words made a link for me to the story of Matthew Shephard, the 21 year old guy who was the victim of a hate crime in Laramie, Wyoming, back in 1998, bashed so brutally and relentlessly and then tied to a fence on the outskirts of town and left to die. Which he eventually did, having first been discovered by a guy cycling past him some 18 hours later, who thought at first he was a scarecrow.
I began thinking about Matthew again after we had bought the dvd of the movie of this and the subsequent events, called The Matthew Shephard Story, and watched it late last year, and I was moved by the film to to search Amazon.com and have a look for what else had been written about him. I ended up buying The Meaning of Matthew, which was written by his mother, Judy, which is a moving account from her perspective and also another fascinating and more scholarly and analytical account, Losing Matt Shephard: Life and Politics in the Aftermath of Anti-Gay Murder, by an academic at the University of Wyoming, Beth Loffreda.
Matt Shephard was left lifeless and twisted like a scarecrow, but tragically for him, such a transformation didn't allow him to 'let him feel no pain'....
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