She performed “Over the Rainbow” at virtually every concert. She could not not perform it — the audience expected it, and the performance of it was part of the specific contract she had made with the people who came to see her. Over the decades, her performance of the song changed: the bright clarity of the original recording gave way, in later concerts, to something more weathered and more personal. The song about a place somewhere over the rainbow, sung by a woman who had been through everything she had been through, carried different weight than the same song sung by a teenager in a studio in 1938.
She did not, by all available accounts, resent the song or the film. She described “Over the Rainbow” as her favorite song. Whether this was an entirely sincere statement or one that had been shaped by decades of being required to present it as sincere is not something the record can fully establish. What is clear is that she performed it, night after night, year after year, until the last concerts of her career. It was part of who she was, the film was part of who she was, and the girl who had made it was part of who she was — even as she built an adult career that went far beyond it.
The ruby slippers are in the Smithsonian. The film plays every year on television. The girl who wore both shoes and the dress — Frances Ethel Gumm, sixteen years old, wearing a corset and performing under studio lights after a day of rehearsal fueled by pills she had been given by people who had commercial interests in her weight and her energy — made something that has lasted eighty-five years and shows no sign of diminishing.