With Solo:
A Star Wars Story on the horizon, I was thinking back on my first
experience seeing Star Wars in
theaters and how it briefly intersected with my (non) love life in junior high.
But teen romance aside and more importantly; I recall the experiences which
shaped my firm belief that Star Wars
is for everyone, despite any online chatter to the contrary.
Enjoy and May the Fourth be with you!
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Heading into the seventh grade, Star Wars was my everything. I lived and
breathed those space operas, consuming them in all their forms.
From toys to video games to novels to trading
cards to my fine pewter Empire Strikes
Back keychain proudly secured to my school backpack – for a good chunk of
my adolescence my allowance belonged to George Lucas.
I was thirteen, had recently moved to Ohio, and
quickly formed friendships with fellow Star
Wars fanatics who shared my obsession. My best friend Richard had a bedroom
the size of a private jet hangar, which housed the largest Star Wars collection in the Midwest by my guesstimate. A shrine to
all things Star Wars, it probably
helped fund a good chunk of The Phantom
Menace. I was in paradise.
But Star
Wars wasn’t the only thing my life revolved around during this period. I
already possessed a healthy curiosity concerning the opposite sex and it was
rapidly accelerating into hyperspace. All my friends and I ever talked about
was girls and Star Wars. Star Wars and girls. That was it.
Light side or dark side? Jenny or
Stacy? Nothing else much mattered to us.
Weekend sleepovers were frequent and if we
weren’t watching Star Wars, we were dialing
up crush-worthy girls having slumber parties of their own, inviting them into
our world via speakerphone.
Not exactly knowing how to talk to girls
without embarrassing ourselves or each other, we mostly let them carry the
conversation. Thankfully they were happy to do so. It was through this that I
discovered who Leonardo DiCaprio was. I hadn’t seen Romeo & Juliet, but I understood that Leo was a big deal and totally
dreamy. Apparently none of these girls had seen Star Wars because no one on the other end of the line was drooling
over Luke Skywalker from what I could tell.
So you can imagine my excitement when it was
announced that in 1997 the Star Wars
trilogy would be returning to theaters nationwide with brand new Special
Editions. By this point I had just about worn out my THX digitally remastered
VHS box set, so I knew these movies forward and backward, line for line... but
experiencing them on the silver screen with 5.1 surround sound… that was
something I only ever dreamed of!
What better way to combine our two passions
than by inviting some of our crushes to join us at the local cinema to
share in this experience?
We got a group together and made arrangements
to meet the girls at the theater. This wasn’t an official “date” or anything.
Just a group of guys and a group of girls hanging out after school. But it was
my first time inviting cute girls to the movies so it felt like training
grounds of sorts. This had all the makings of a night to remember.
We took our seats, eagerly anticipating the
John Williams score to erupt and the iconic crawl in massive yellow font to
begin scrolling. The girls sat a row behind us, further cementing that this
indeed not in any way a date nor could we even try to pretend that it was. Not
that it bothered me because STAR WARS! The movie began. I was transfixed.
About midway through being fully transported
to a galaxy far, far away, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Erin. She was
bored and informed me she and her friends were going. I can’t recall if she
asked me to leave with them or not, but I do remember practically waving them
off so I could get back to the action on screen. Truthfully, I was a little
surprised and disappointed but no way was I going to let it spoil the movie for
me.
It was pretty clear there was no use trying
to convince the girls to stay anyway. They were not enjoying themselves and apparently
had wasted enough of their Friday evening on this silly space flick. Even if I
could talk them into staying, it would have detracted from my own enjoyment knowing
they’d rather be somewhere else. It was not at all how I envisioned the night
going, but it was an honest reaction so I couldn’t hold it against them. Their
inner critics had spoken and Star Wars
was not winning them over, Special Edition or not.
Upon exiting the theater and still basking in
the afterglow of having witnessed the Death Star blow up bigger than ever
before, I was struck by a realization. We were split evenly down the middle.
Thumbs up from the guys, thumbs down from the girls. Was Star Wars strictly for boys? It occurred to me that I had never
really met any female Star Wars fans.
Well, that wasn’t exactly true. There was
Julie.
Julie was not friends with these other girls.
She was a little peculiar at times and had a very unique style. In other words,
she did not “fit in.”
We shared a few classes and she knew I liked Star Wars (the keychain was a dead
giveaway), an easy icebreaker. She once made me laugh in English reading off a
list of reasons why Star Wars was cooler
than Star Trek in every way. At the
time I foolishly believed that you had to choose one over the other and determined
that Star Trek was lame by
comparison. I’ve since abandoned that notion but by buying into the rivalry
between the two heavyweight sci-fi franchises, I was able to connect with
someone who spoke the same language.
Julie wasn’t exactly the most
popular girl in school, not that she seemed to care about that sort of thing. If
she did stick out, it was for letting her freak flag fly. For example, she
carried on her a Han Solo action figure, which would ride passenger in the
front pocket of her jeans for all to see as she wandered the halls. I was very
familiar with this toy as I had one of my own. She would pull the figure out
during lunch and prop him up on the cafeteria table, almost as if he were her
lunch date. This naturally led to teasing that Han was her imaginary boyfriend.
Despite her status as an
outcast, I found myself identifying more with Julie than our movie “dates” that
ditched us. Looking back, those girls more closely resembled the “plastics” of Mean Girls while Julie was actually kind
of… cool? Cool for a geek anyway. Hey, wait a minute… did that make me a geek? Because as we all know, geeks
aren’t cool. At least they weren’t at that time in Ankeny Junior High where
geek was a dirty four-letter word.
The year prior, I attended an
all-boys school and I never thought twice about it. As far as I could tell, all
my peers enjoyed Star Wars, whether
you were “cool” or not. But I was slowly beginning to understand that being a
fan of Star Wars was like a blemish
on your reputation. It wasn't something you talked about if you wanted to
attract girls. Well, unless that girl was Julie.
She had invited me to her
Halloween party a few months prior when I was still “the new kid” and making
friends. Not wanting to go alone, I dragged Richard along. I dressed up as the
Phantom from Phantom of the Opera
(still one of my better costumes). Richard came as a Jedi Knight. As the night
wore on, we embraced our inner geeks and, knowing whose party it was, put them
fully on display, free from judgment. By removing my mask, my Phantom cloak
easily doubled as a Jedi robe. Richard had brought a spare lightsaber that he
leant me. We broke into a lightsaber duel right there in the middle of the
party. Richard was finally having fun. After all, this is what we did every
weekend. Only this time we had an audience to cheer us on. We were one
camcorder away from being internet famous. Star
Wars kids before “Star Wars Kid.”
