May the Fourth Be With You!

This is kind of a significant holiday in my mind, even if it isn't a national holiday. (My sort of drunk neighbors across the street celebrated Derby Day, because it involved Bourbon beverages and because they could not wait for Cinco de Mayo, also known as the day we venerate fermented agave products. They may have not known what to drink for Fourth Day, but the answer is, whatever, so long as the force is with you. I have the force with me, because I Drink, or Drink Not--there is no Dry.)

The reason I like remembering Star Wars in a holiday sort of way, though, is because it was, yea, verily, the movie they now call Episode Four that was the first movie I ever saw in a theater. Oh my, yes. My cousin Joan took me to the Crest theater which was one of those old-timey affairs with one, count'em, one screen.  If you had to pick one movie to be your first in-a-theater movie though, you could have done far worse.  I was a little kid, so every image imprinted on my impressionable brain, and a lot of things were decided.

Leia was awesome, because she knew what she was doing and was like, the leader of the rebels, which naturally made her the hero of the movie, thank you very much.

Luke Skywalker was awkward and was very lucky to run into Obi-Wan Kenobi, or he would have been totally stuck shooting wamp-rats and watching his toenails grow.

I totally decided things about what is a cute boy because Han Solo.

And the scene where they ended up in the trash compactor has given me anxiety to this day--not because the walls were closing in. Oh, no. I am a person who would be at home in a straitjacket--give me hugs or give me agoraphobia (hashtag, TMI). It was the dirtiness that bugged me. It was wet and there was squishy bits. I to this day do not like being in close contact with squishy dirty things.

I also think it isn't surprising that I saw Obi-Wan as a grandfatherly figure and thought his death was terribly sad from Luke's POV. But it wasn't until I was older that the destruction of Alderaan seemed like the enormity that it actually was.  And now this is, to me, about as symbolic of the badness of the Dark Side as the corruption of Anakin and the slaughter of the Younglings--the Dark Side brings destructive senseless shit.

I think you understand why anyone would want to be a Jedi when you are young, but you don't get the Dark Side and why it sucks so hard but still appeals to some, until you get older. In other words, Star Wars has been a big part of the prism I view my reality through.