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Anniversaries
Today, June 15, is my parents' 49th wedding anniversary.
They have loved and respected and supported and laughed with each other in a way that some people think exists only in stories, and I love and admire them deeply.
Today also marks the 29th anniversary of my first viewing of Star Wars.
Because on June 15, 1977, when I was 12 years old, they could not find a babysitter to watch me while they drove to the city to have dinner and see this popular new film that we didn't really know anything about.
But my aunt and uncle had said that I should see it, because I would really like the princess in it -- so they finally decided to take me with them.
We went to a Chinese restaurant and I had a cheeseburger.
Then we stood in a very, very long line for more than an hour.
And then the lights went out, and there was this huge crash of music, and an old-fashioned roll-out prologue. . . and my life has never quite been the same since.
They have loved and respected and supported and laughed with each other in a way that some people think exists only in stories, and I love and admire them deeply.
Today also marks the 29th anniversary of my first viewing of Star Wars.
Because on June 15, 1977, when I was 12 years old, they could not find a babysitter to watch me while they drove to the city to have dinner and see this popular new film that we didn't really know anything about.
But my aunt and uncle had said that I should see it, because I would really like the princess in it -- so they finally decided to take me with them.
We went to a Chinese restaurant and I had a cheeseburger.
Then we stood in a very, very long line for more than an hour.
And then the lights went out, and there was this huge crash of music, and an old-fashioned roll-out prologue. . . and my life has never quite been the same since.
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And you have yet another beautiful and cool icon.
I think that quotation captures one of my favorite things about the LOTR trilogy: that again and again the primary characters do terrifyingly heroic things not because they want to save the world, but because they will be there for their friends. Sure Aragorn knows that if the attack on the Black Gate succeeds, the world will be free of Sauron, but what he says -- and what is in his heart -- is, "For Frodo."
Same with Eowyn. She speaks of valor and honor elsewhere, but when it comes right down to the crises, both at Helms Deep and at Peleannor, she invokes love and friendship.
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Yes, George betrayed my first love and broke my heart.
My actual initiator into SciFi was Sylvia Louise Engdahl, with her book Enchantress from the Stars. She uses the fairytale motif of the brothers leaving home to kill a dragon, and the youngest keeping his bargain with a sorceror in the woods when the others would renege, as the basis for a story in which people from three different cultures (two interstellar, one medieval) encounter each other in a crisis, each from a different world, with his or her own interpretation and understanding of events.
It taught me, a year before Star Wars, that scifi wasn't all BEM's and ray-guns, and that where you stand determines what you see and how you interpret it.
It was only then that I started watching Star Trek and borrowed a huge omnibus of Heinlein's Future History stories.
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(Can you believe that after we'd seen the movie three times over a one week period and then driving to Chicago my parents tried to convince my brothers and I to see Pete's Dragon instead of going a fourth time???!) (What? Were they smoking crack?)
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*sigh*
no caffeine in my system yet
is my lousy excuse...
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Stating the obvious
Huh...I just remembered there was a guy in my class who was obssessed with Star Wars and wanted to make movies like that. I wonder what became of him? I guess for every Peter Jackson there are hundreds (thousands?) who never make their movie, for whatever reason.