Some ‘Wicked’ Advice For Weiner

Anthony Weiner Image by Getty Images

By Anne Cohen July 31, 2013

Anthony Weiner can rest easy: Kristen Chenoweth has found a way to save his campaign.

Chenowith, best known for her Tony Award-winning performance in “Wicked,” the hit Broadway musical, gave the disgraced candidate a little advice during a parody rendition of one of the show’s hits, “Popular,” on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

“Can’t you see it in my face, this is the toughest case I’ve had to face,” Chenoweth sang. “Don’t you worry, Carlos Danger is no more.”

In the original song, Chenoweth’s character — a pretty and popular teenaged Glinda the Good Witch — is giving advice to her outcast roommate Elphaba (the Wicked Witch of the West), on how to get in with the good crowd.

The parody gives Weiner some similar wisdom.

You will be pop-u-lar,” she chorused — “the right kind of popular./ I’ll teach you to zip your fly/ you won’t be that guy/ with a camera down his pants.”

“So let’s start,” she added, “’cause you’ve got an awfully long way to go. … Long? Well, mmm.”

Finally, she warned:

“There’ll be no more sexy texts

with your biceps flexed.

Your roaming eye will roam no more.

You want to be the mayor –

stop acting like a big ol’ whore.”

Learn the lyrics and sing along below:

Anne Cohen was the Forward’s deputy digital media editor. When she’s not looking for the secret Jewish history of Voodoo in New Orleans, or making lists about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, she writes for The Assimilator. She graduated from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism with an M.S. magazine concentration in 2012.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO