My Harry Potter Experience

The evening of November 16^th, 2001 was a brisk one. Almost ten years later I remember this detail, because on the evening of November 16^th, 2001, I stood in my school parking lot, ranting and shivering, many hours after our 3:00 release, as I waited for a very, very late ride. I didn’t wait alone—two close friends of mine at the time, Elena and Sara, waited with me, the three of us seated on a curb, waiting for Elena’s mom—Mrs. L.—to come and bring us to the event we’d been waiting on for months.

I was in fifth grade; in possibly my first ever direct experience with Fandango.com, we had ordered our tickets ahead of time, because there was no way that we were not seeing that movie that night.

                   

The movie, of course, being Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

Mrs. L.—the unreliable mother of my friend Elena who had been charged with bringing us to the Fairfield movie theater—arrived three hours late, twenty minutes before the movie was supposed to start at a movie theater forty minutes away from us.

You see, a house had fallen in the road.

Rewind about a year and a half, to a day that I only vaguely recall, when I was dragged along on a shopping trip with my mother. We stopped at a thrift shop called Jackie’s, which smelled like most thrift shops do and played a non-stop soundtrack of bad adult contemporary. I imagine Borgin and Burke’s to have a similar layout (if rather different content): an assortment of old ties and dishes and furniture and gaudy 80s jewelry piled halfhazardly in unconcerned heaps or else scattered across shelves and broken display racks. However, atop one such heap was a book. I’d heard about it, but I hadn’t read it, because we didn’t own a copy, there wasn’t a copy in my classroom, and the waiting list at the library was always twenty names long.

But there sat a nearly new edition of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. It was in decent condition, a dull corner or two, perhaps, but thoroughly readable, so I’m really not sure how it ended up in Jackie’s, placed next to some 1970s style coffee mugs. And on a whim, I asked Mom to buy it.

My mom didn’t usually buy us kids things on shopping trips; I think this was generally a positive thing for the formation of my character and how I regard money, but I’m eternally grateful that, for no apparent reason on that day, my mother agreed to buy that used edition of Philosopher’s, sorry, Sorcerer’s Stone.

The fact that my mother agreed to purchase a book at all was somewhat remarkable, because she hates buying books. It’s not that she hates books, of course: I don’t want you to imagine that my mother is some Aunt Petunia or Uncle Vernon-like figure who hates imagination... or that she’s a devil straight out of Georgian England that finds fiction to be frivolous: quite the reverse. Mom loves books... but she does not like buying new ones, due to the fact that our house is positively swamped in them. People have described walking into my garage as having a similar effect on them as the scene in Beauty and the Beast when Beast shows Belle the library—if, y’know, the library in Beauty and the Beast had a washing machine and ironing board in it. But you get the idea.

I would wager that my parents’ house homes upwards of eight hundred books, with new ones arriving every other day via UPS truck. Thus, clutter-hating Mom did not like buying new books... especially since it was statistically likely that we already owned the books in question.

But, miraculously, she made an exception to two of her rules—buying items not on her list and buying books—and spent all of five dollars on the first Harry Potter book.

I started reading it later that day, and I can tell you the precise moment that I fell in love with it.

“Cats didn’t read maps.”

Something about that line just positively tickled me. The first chapter of Sorcerer’s Stone remains one of my favorites to this day. I feel like I’m nine every time I read it.

Sorcerer’s Stone is brilliant because it has all the elements that an awesome children’s story should have, without being Roald Dahl. A lot of people enjoy Roald Dahl stories, but I never did. Part of that is my extreme issues with Roald Dahl as a person, but most of it is that I always hated the characters. The central children characters never appealed to me, the adults were invariably nasty, and the worlds in which they operated made me unhappy. Reading a Roald Dahl book—or most children’s story, especially fantasy ones—didn’t make me want to jump into their universe; their worlds did not excite me or make me want to go on an adventure or develop any kind of genuine affection for the characters. They just made me feel kind of cynical.

But Harry Potter was very different for me. It was... basically the opposite of all that. It was exciting and new and inspiring, and I was hooked.

Chamber of Secrets expanded the Harry Potter universe. Dobby. Lucius Malfoy. The Diary. Hagrid. The Death Day Party. Tom Marvolo Riddle. Re-reading it, I tend to forget that I ever didn’t know what a Horcrux was, but the first time I read it, I remember thinking that I hoped they revisited the chamber at some point, because it was such a shame that there was a big empty room with a dead snake under the school that no one ever saw.

I could probably talk for about a year concerning Prisoner of Azkaban. Smarter people have said that they saw Sirius-Black-is-good coming from a mile away, but for me, the second that whole scene transpired, I was irrevocably hooked on Harry Potter. The series is amazing because it lets the children characters be awesome without making all the adults the villains. Remus Lupin is an awesome character for that reason alone. Prisoner of Azkaban gave us the Marauders too, my little, not-so-secret obsession within the Potter-verse, and Rowling even managed to do time-travel in a way that didn’t utterly irk me (as a child raised on science fiction, I have very strong opinions about utterly unimportant things: the depiction of time travel is one of these things). Prisoner of Azkaban is my favorite book to this day (although, objectively, Goblet of Fire and Deathly Hallows might be “better” books. But, God, I just love them all).

Oh, and also: Hermione.

A brief moment in honor of Hermione Granger.

Hermione Granger is a smart girl. She’s clever, she’s unpopular, she’s awkward—she’s a know-it-all, but she’s not mean. She’s imperfect... sometimes she’s really, really obnoxious, but she cares about things, and she makes clever girls everywhere want to be adventurous. Every Harry-Potter-teaches-bad-lessons argument out there is invalidated by Hermione Granger... at least as far as I’m concerned.

And then there was Goblet of Fire. Goblet came out shortly before the first movie, so there I was more than a little bit excited. A copy was purchased for our classroom library, and I remember monopolizing that thing for ages. I used it as a weapon once, too, so, y’know, win. Goblet of Fire is a beautiful book—it’s my favorite book cover, for one thing, and the whole thing is just wonderfully constructed. I recommend a re-read to everyone, because it’s really just magnificent.

So now we’re caught up. 2001. November. Cold and grey. Standing in the parking lot of my school with Elena and Sara, waiting for Mrs. L. to pick us up.

The thing you have to understand about Mrs. L. is that she is completely unreliable. Whatever plans you make with her WILL fall through. They will crash and burn and die in a sad, pathetic little heap, like a thousand crushed dreams.

And then something better will happen.

I don’t know how it works, but whenever you’re with Mrs. L., no matter how dire a situation gets—no matter how extraordinarily fucked you seem to be (and, with Mrs. L., the situation will get that dire), somehow, things will work out to your advantage. Somehow, out of the ashes of your silly little plans, will rise an even greater plan... an even grander, more beautiful, shimmering, sparkling, beams-of-light-Hallelujah-chorus plan.

Like, if you’re driving in a car with her, that car will break down. But then you’ll be rescued by a limo with Chuck Norris in it.

I’m exaggerating. Wait, no I’m not. That’s exactly the sort of thing that would happen with Mrs. L. Miss your flight, end up seated next to a celebrity on the next one. True story.

Of course, twenty minutes before we were supposed to see Sorcerer’s Stone on opening night, it was a little hard to have that kind of perspective.

You see, a house had fallen in the road. No, literally, a house fell in the road. Mrs. L. was driving to pick us up, and a house, being transported on a truck, fell in the road in front of her, blocking traffic.

How can that happen? That doesn’t happen in real life! But it does when you’re dealing with Mrs. L.

So we drove to the movie theater anyway, arriving twenty minutes after our planned show time. My adventures with online ticket purchase were for naught, but, more importantly, I was kind of terrified I wasn’t going to be able to see that movie tonight.

You see, my mom is kind of strict, in case you couldn’t tell from the ‘not buying things for children’ rule. The next showing of Sorcerer’s Stone was at 10:45 p.m., the movie was over two hours, and the theater we had inexplicably chosen to attend was forty minutes from my town. I knew—I just knew there was no way Mom would let me go, especially since some of her friends were critics of Harry Potter on moral grounds, and she was beginning to wonder if she was a bad parent for letting me obsess over the series to begin with. (One year later, one such friend of my mother’s would comically attempt to prevent me from seeing Chamber of Secrets... more on that later).

First, my friend Sara called her parents. Her dad was the one who donated the copy of Goblet to our fifth grade classroom, and they were notoriously laissez-faire about curfew, so no worries there. Then, I borrowed Mrs. L.’s cell phone to call my mother.

“So—we missed the six-thirty showing...”

“Did you get your money back?”

“No, they won’t give it to us.”

“Well that’s annoying.”

“I know... but... there’s another show time. I have money for another ticket... but it’s at ten-forty-five. Can I go?”

“Uh-huh sure.”

...

“...Seriously?”

“Yeah, Dad’ll wait up.”

“...Seriously?”

“Yeah. I’m making dinner. Call when you’re out. Bye!”

Click.

Uh-huh, sure, like she always allowed her fifth-grade daughter stay out till one in the morning with her friends. I didn’t argue though. We went to Barnes & Noble and looked through all the Harry Potter books there, waiting for the next showing. I have never been the same.

A fucking house. In the road.

That just doesn’t happen.

That experience taught me a lot of things. One, that my mother is not as crazy as I like to think she is. Two, that I should NEVER rely on Mrs. L. for something.

So, why was it, one year later, that I once again was waiting for her to show up to take us to Chamber of Secrets? Because I’m an idiot. Or, because my friend, Elena, currently in law school, is a brilliant, brilliant manipulator.

For Chamber of Secrets, we didn’t wait in the school parking lot. We bought later tickets this time, so it was all arranged beforehand, nice and neat. We decided to wait at our friend, Lily’s, house.

Lily’s mother was... um... enthusiastically Catholic. Don’t get me wrong—my parents are Catholic. Like the Pope. Too Catholic to function, okay? Really, really freaking Catholic. But my family does not think Harry Potter is evil, so I don’t want anyone assuming that all Catholics think this. Because they don’t.

But Mrs. F. does. Why we decided to wait at Mrs. F.’s house for Mrs. L. to pick us up is another unsolved mystery. And yet we did. We tried to keep from her the fact that we were going to see a Devil Movie, but she totally knew. She kept unsubtly inviting us to stay for dinner, or to stay and watch a movie there instead. At one point, she took Elena into the kitchen and started to pray on her.

It’s quite possible that Mrs. F. believed the three of us to be possessed, because I definitely caught her surreptitiously sprinkling holy water on Elena at one point.

Six o’clock arrived. The movie began at eight.

Mrs. L. wasn’t showing up.

So, we stopped taking chances and took action.

That is, my friend Sara took action, in the form of calling her dad and getting us an alternate ride. I still have the Chamber of Secrets themed plastic popcorn bucket. I will probably be buried with it.

For the third, fourth, and fifth films, my friends and I were much more organized. Scratch that, I got my act together. I threw down and declared that we would be seeing the film in my town; I would arrange the tickets, and I would arrange the rides. Houses do not fall in the road for me, and maybe I don’t get picked up by Chuck Norris limos, but my micromanaging ways get. shit. done. And without giving me hypertension.

The sixth film was the real problem, though. You see, for all of the first five movies, whether we were driving forty-five minutes or standing in line for midnight showings, Elena and I had watched them for the first time together. I don’t know why we are Harry-Potter-friends. We agree on almost nothing about the series. She is an adamant Harry/Hermione shipper, dislikes Lupin/Tonks, and prefers Lupin to Sirius. We are both team Lily/James though. For whatever reason, however, Elena and I are Harry-Potter-best-friends, and, up to Half-Blood Prince we had seen every one of those movies together.

The problem: the sixth movie came out about a month after I jumped on a plane to be a nanny, five hundred miles away from her. I couldn’t get any time off until three weeks after its release.

We were faced with an ethical dilemma. See the movie apart first, or wait three weeks and see it together. Break our sacred tradition, or suffer in bitter agony for almost a month, while even casual Harry Potter fans—even, Oh, I totally like Harry Potter, I’ve seen every movie people... even wait, what’s Gary Oldman character’s name? people went and enjoyed the film adaptation of the book that I had read cover to cover within eighteen hours of its release.

But, in the end, we decided to wait for each other.

The next three weeks passed, but not quickly. Elena and I were afraid to watch TV, lest a commercial for Half-Blood Prince come on and wear down our self control. The internet was a very limited place: we wouldn’t even click on the little links on the Yahoo! homepage that had articles about the movie’s box office results. The temptation was too great.

Then, at last, the time came for me to return home. I flew into SFO and took a cab to the movie theater, where I met Elena for the 10 p.m. showing.

The theater was completely empty. In retrospect, that was the best theater viewing of a Harry Potter movie that we’ve ever had: every flaw, every deviation from the book could be ranted about full-volume. Every, Ron and Hermione are so cute, and every NO THEYRE NOT I HATE YOU could be expressed in the tones they were meant to be expressed in.

It was beautiful.

Deathly Hallows Part I was far less eventful. We got there hours early, were the third people in line, and hung out with some cool hipsters who had their books with them, causing me to realize how much I fucking love my generation. The highlight of the film was die-hard Harry/Hermione shipping Elena admitting that Deathly Hallows chipped at her resolve. And, c’mon, Rupert Grint was FINE in that movie, right?

So, Friday—or Thursday night, c’mon—Elena and I are going to the midnight release of the last movie. Harry Potter has been my childhood and my adolescence and a huge part of my life. I have formed friendships around this series, been excused from work to finish reading a new release, been moved and inspired and infuriated and thrilled by the Harry Potter books.

I even spent an hour writing pages of cheesy pure, unfiltered nostalgia in honor of the last film and an end of an era (but not really, because is it ever really going to end?). Because pretty much no matter what, I always have and always will love Harry Potter.