For more than three decades, local nonprofit organization Broadway Grand Rapids has been host to some of the best that New York City’s “great white way” has to offer. Regularly, year after year, musical theater superfans from around West Michigan will venture downtown to head inside the DeVos Performance Hall for some high-production, high-energy entertainment. 

It was not without some trepidation that I put on my sandals and headed to Electric Forest. It had been thirteen years since I last attended a music festival (Bonnaroo, in 2009); in that time, I had acquired a wife, two children, a house, and a monstrous dog, along with a comfortable ignorance and suspicion of much of modern music.

Mean Girls was released 18 years ago, in 2004. Children born at the time graduated high school this year, having survived the gauntlet that the film depicts: a gauntlet of pettiness, deception, and casual cruelty.

When voters decided to legalize adult-use cannabis in 2018, the hope was that this would be a progressive shift forward, a brand-new market created from the ground up that could build social equity into the very system.