Day 44

Hello everyone and hope you all are well, and enjoyed this beautiful day. I would like to with wish you all a very Happy Star Wars Day, and hope you all somehow marked the remembrance.  I was on a Facetime call with my son, daughter tonight along with techie. We were recalling that day many years ago that we first saw the preview of Star Wars and how blown away we were.  My roommate and I were at a Fellini movie downtown Boston, when a preview of the first Star Wars movie came on and after it was over we just looked at each other in amazement. We may have been a bit buzzed, it was a Fellini movie but that preview just blew us away, we thought this will never fly, and boy were we so wrong. It was just do different from anything we had seen on the big screen, and now looking at the special effects, compared to today they look so primitive.  It is just amazing of how many loyal fans this franchise has amassed over the years and how many Darth Vader and storm trooper costumes we have seen on Halloween. Honestly the franchise has been going close to fifty years and remembering that night back in the late seventies, I could never have predicted its popularity. So it was a bit different at our house because years later came Space Balls, and anyone who is a Mel Brooks fan would not have missed this movie.  I can remember the first time we saw it in a small suburban theater, with very few patrons and we howled with laughter till we cried. At the time it seemed like the few people there didn’t think it was as funny as we did that night, but it quickly became our family favorite. In fact we watched this movie so often at our house that my son Max at an early age had never seen the original Star Wars, but his favorite character was John Candy, as a Mawg, half man and half dog. True story, Max and I were in Harvard square one day sitting on the steps eating lunch and there was a radio station broadcasting remotely form the square that day and there studio was a Winnebago type of vehicle. There was a crowd around and everyone was sitting around enjoying their lunch and the beautiful weather. Suddenly Max who was almost 4 years old stands up and starts yelling that there is a space ship next to us, Mom he yells look at the space ship. He is so excited and yelling as loud as he can that everyone is looking around wondering what he is talking about and I ask him what you are talking about Max there is no space ship, but he points to the Winnebago and says there, Lone Star and Barf.  I really started howling with laughter that tears were streaming down may face as I tried to calm him down and convince him this was not a spaceship. When I saw my roommate that evening I told him we may have done a disservice to our son, letting him watch the parody a dozen times before he actually saw the real movie. Yes we were truly bad parents, and didn’t monitor the screen time, like parents do today and that may account for some missing brain cells in our kids today, but it is what it is, and no turning back. Maybe because we were retailers, and recognized the importance of the Power of the Schwartz and the importance of merchandising, that made it such a family favorite. It stuck me today how important these family memories are and how much we want to cherish them, as I don’t want my grandkids to be about Family Facetime visits during the time of quarantine. I wonder what kind of movie will come out about this time of our life. Will the movie even ever play in a theater, will we ever go the movie theaters again?  Imagine if a few months ago we had seen a trailer of a movie about a pandemic that was shutting down the country and killing people?  Wow that would have been seen as a really scary movie coming soon to a theatre near you and would have been viewed as a true work of fiction. Imagine something so scary that it has forced adult children to move back to the suburbs and ensconced themselves back in their parents’ home.  What nightmares this would bring for the empty nesters who may have thought it was fun to be snowed in for a while but then they never left and there was no end in sight. Just kidding it is only a movie and no one would believe it……..

Just sayin