May the Fourth again (except now it's Cinco de Mayo)

I wanted to share a weirdly sweet memory from days of yore when I was still untainted by corporate America etc etc. I thought of it while watching The Empire Strikes Back. Actually while watching the opening crawl because I zoned for a minute or so and had to restart the movie and then zoned again during the opening and restarted so I watched from point 0:00 three times in just a few minutes, which triggered this memory.

I thought it was a shame I had already posted my May the Fourth piece, especially since it was more about the suckiness of the day (I think, I honestly don't remember what I wrote, only what I didn't write) than about Star Wars. But then I thought I'd write a second May the Fourth post and it could be my bonus feature to you. And I was totally gonna do that as soon as I finished SW: TESB.

The weirdly sweet memory:

I am Star Wars Generation One. I was 7 when Star Wars (what we now call Episode IV or A New Hope but back then it was just Star Wars because it was the only Star Wars) came out. Sometime not long before I saw SW: ANH I saw (a movie, a play -- I really don't know) an adaptation of The Snow Queen which opened up this whole wild 'n crazy idea of the girl character battling a villainess and ultimately rescuing the boy character. Which was a pretty big deal in the late '70s.

And then came SW: ANH and Leia was super cool and the only character who could actually hit anything with a blaster and ohemgee <squeal!> It was the fairy tales I hadn't outgrown yet (ok, I never outgrew fairy tales) but radical and for adults!

I totally had a plan to steal the Millennium Falcon from Han Solo. I was amazed other Catholic school 7 year-olds didn't. What was wrong with these kids?!

My mother took me, and I assume my toddler brother, to see it after school one spring day. It might have been the last half-day of classes. I don't know how many times I saw it in the theater as a child. It may have been only once or twice. I wanted to watch it every day, but I didn't need to because I lived it in my head. My Barbies saved the universe every afternoon after school.

And then there was SW: TESB and SW: RotJ. I was a teenager by then. I still loved them. Still loved fairy tales, tho I had less patience with "someday my prince will come" princesses. I liked strong female characters, sassy women who took charge. And I still wanted to steal the Falcon.

Obviously I saw other movies as a child. Some, like The Muppet Movie, have stayed with me just as much as SW. But (and here's the memory I promised) I always associated the old 1970's Twentieth Century Fox opening fanfare with Star Wars. Like well into adulthood. Whenever I heard that part of my heart leapt and I'd think, "It's Star Wars! The theater is accidentally showing Star Wars instead of <fill in any other 20th Century Fox movie from the 1978-1995>." And I'd be very slightly disappointed when the movie I paid to see started instead.

So why didn't I post this last night as a bonus feature? Because I got itchy. Very itchy. There's a weird point when my allergies max out that's like my whole nervous system short circuits and I'm just itchy all over. Remember walking through overgrown wet grass on a summer evening and coming out with a million jillion chigger bites on your ankles? That's what it's like except all over, every damn inch of my body. Not something addressed in a Claritin commercial.

So I watched Empire and took an antihistamine and changed nightgowns because the one I was wearing felt too scratchy even tho it's probably the softest and went to bed.

Imagine these last few paragraphs in slow title crawl, yellow text on starry black background . . .