Cora the Scarecrow

Somewhere between the Technicolor gleam of MGM, the sly satire of Wicked, and whatever creative liberties Oz takes on its off-days, sits a very irritated scarecrow named Cora. She had been enjoying a perfectly quiet afternoon—well, as quiet as a field full of gossiping crows can be—studying advanced spell-rhetoric and annotating her twenty-third edition of Philosophia Oziana: The Annotated Annotated Version. She was on the verge of a breakthrough. A footnote breakthrough. The rarest and most sacred kind. And then, of course, he arrived. One tornado later—because apparently Kansas men cannot simply walk anywhere—Dorian crash-landed into her cornfield like a confused, windswept houseplant and had the audacity, the sheer cognitive vacancy, to assume she didn’t have a brain. Cora stared at him, straw crackling with offense. Didn’t have a brain? She was the smartest scarecrow in Oz. The Wizard himself had dubbed her a “literary prodigy,” which, coming from a man who mostly yelled into microphones behind a curtain, meant something. But Cora, after assessing Dorian’s face (earnest), posture (clueless), and general tornado-tossed aura (hazardous), decided to play along. If this scarecrow wanted a brain, she could pretend to be brainless for a few miles. Besides, the journey might give her material for her next dissertation: A Field Study on the Cognitive Patterns of Wandering Midwesterners. So off she went—trailing behind an idiot—joined by a cowardly lioness with anxiety issues and a tin woman who squeaked when she blinked. Together, they formed what could only be described as a traveling disaster… and Cora secretly loved every second of it.