Kingdom of Valbowski

For the sixth time in my college career, I attended a midnight premiere screening of a movie last night. This time, we saw Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith, the most highly-anticipated premiere of the bunch. Surprisingly, the five of us (Me, Conor, Logan, Elliot, Chief) fit in fairly well. However, some people REALLY embarrassed themselves in the eyes of any normal human being. There were those dressed in capes and masks, those with light sabers battling in front of the entire theater and one guy who made an entire storm trooper (the white bad dudes) outfit out of paper plates. There also were a few homemade t-shirts, akin to something I see 7-year olds wearing at Twins games. One dude put on a short expo of his light saber moves alone in front of the packed theater, drawing inexplicable oohs and ahhs. The guy was swinging around a long plastic, lit-up whiffle bat for goodness sakes. I'll go up there and do a little praying mantis and bring down the house if you'd like. Congratulations you can swing around a stick.

Star Wars fans are fairly giddy. They are quite excitable, and VERY unkempt, not to mention smelly. And on this night, they cheered for just about everything, the loudest of the cheers coming when we were notified the movie would be brought to us with THX sound--you know, that really loud organ-sounding thing before movies. Yeah, they cheered for that. Thankfully, the movie played out without many interrupting applauses, save for Yoda's ass-kicking scenes.

While listening to talk radio earlier that day, I heard a discussion about Star Wars fans and grown men dressing up as Wookies and Jedis. Mark Rosen, the sports guy for WCCO, and Chad Hartman, host of his own radio show on KFAN, were leading the chatter. Rosen, by the end of the conversation, was seriously considering going to a midnight showing to see all the fans. As they were cutting to commercial, Rosen accidentally spoke into his microphone, and his candid words could be heard on the radio. He said: "Today is one of those nights where I'm not going to be driving, I know I won't be driving. So I'm going to drink X amount of alcohol and see what I blow." Oops. May the Schnapps be with you.