I got on board with the whole Harry Potter thing a little late in the game. Even though I live my life surrounded by kids for most of the year, the Potter books had escaped my radar in their earlier days. I first knew of it as a phenomenon on a dark and stormy July night, watching some national news magazine reporting on all of the kids waiting in line to buy "Goblet of Fire" at midnight. I figured it was something I should know more about, and had myself caught up with the first four books in a matter of weeks. It was a convenient excuse to say I was following it all so closely because I was an elementary teacher, and felt like I should stay on top of whatever my students were interested in at the time. Admittedly this was a pretty thin excuse -- after all, I've never seen an episode of Hannah Montana, I didn't buy any *NSYNC albums, and to this day I still have no idea how to play Pokémon. So my need to stay in touch with what my students like has its limits.
Once I was caught up in the whole Hogwarts-world mythology, I wound up reading and re-reading each book several times. It became an escape for me while my sister was sick. Reading Harry Potter on the love seat up in my loft with my dog beside me, the house darkened except for a reading lamp, with the John Williams scores from the movie series shuffling through an iTunes playlist providing the background music for my reading was a valuable coping tool during that time. I became very caught up in the mythology, even buying a couple of fan-exploiting speculation books where people had analyzed the books for clues that might provide hints about what still could be coming up in the overall story. Which was perfect reading for someone who overthinks 250 different things on any given day.
My first hardcover copy of "Prisoner of Azkaban" was stolen from my classroom. It was kind of a bummer since it was hardcover, but part of being a teacher is just accepting that at some point books are going to disappear from your personal library. And since Azkaban is my least favorite of the series, it wasn't really the end of the world. It was curious when, months later, a kid gave me a brand new copy of it, just out of the goodness of his heart, since he was so marked by the injustice of my book being stolen. I'm still slightly suspicious about this...
The year "Order of the Phoenix" was scheduled to come out saw the excitement build to a fever pitch at school. I read "Goblet of Fire" to my class that spring -- and it took the whole spring to finish, with several days when read aloud time stretched well beyond the allotted twenty minutes. We even had a poster from the first movie hanging in the classroom that year, and I let the students, led by one particularly psychopathic Harry Potter nerd, keep a countdown to the release date for "Order of the Phoenix" on the whiteboard. Using "Goblet" as a read aloud was kind of a precarious thing to do since this was back in the time when there was a little bubble of controversy around the whole witchcraft element of the stories, but I only heard anything about it from one parent. I got an e-mail from a mom later that summer, saying that my reading Harry Potter to the class had been what had broken through her son's lifelong resistance to reading independently, and that he'd read all of the other books as soon as school had gotten out, and then moved on to other books as well. A pretty gratifying moment.
I was so pumped to get "Phoenix" that I used taking Nephew #1 to the midnight release at Borders as an excuse to wait in line. And wait we did... we probably weren't out of there until at least 1:00, which was much later than Nephew #1 wanted to be there. Although he did read himself to sleep as soon as we were home. We planned ahead better for the midnight release of "Half-Blood Prince," and staked out a place in line as soon as we were allowed in for the Borders festivities. Luckily we hooked up with a group of people all loosely associated with school (including the little girl who would go on to nominate me for my teaching award a couple of years afterward) so the waiting was a lot less boring. Nephew #1 and Award Girl had quite the time laughing over the books in the section where we waited, which were all foreign language translations of current bestsellers. And since this was toward the front of the store, we were out of there in a beautiful eight minutes.
Years later Nephew #1 and I finished off our midnight appointments waiting for "Deathly Hallows." We walked around a bit and snarked to each other about all of the people there in costumes and face paint, then got in line before it became unreasonably long. That year I knew I'd wind up seeing people from school, so I defiantly wore my Pearls Before Swine "People Are Idiots, and I Hate Them" t-shirt, just to see how many raised eyebrows I'd get. There were certainly a few. There would have been even more if those parents had realized how many times I'd worn that same t-shirt underneath a respectable-looking sweater during parent-teacher conferences....
By the time "Deathly Hallows" came out, some of the thrill had burned away for me -- I just didn't need the escape like I had before. By then it was more about having everything resolved and finding out how it ended than about getting all kinds of questions answered. Once I had finished the books and knew how it all worked out, the movies lost a lot of magic since there wasn't anything to speculate over anymore. I've always loved the movies, even the ones that some people don't think worked as well. I was really taken with the first two because the casting and the settings had, for the most part, closely matched how I had envisioned so much of the story... although, I personally don't feel that Michael Gambon's Dumbledore ever came close to Richard Harris's, and I think there was a huge lost opportunity when Tim Roth turned down the part of Snape in favor of that stupid "Planet of the Apes" remake that came out about the same time. Seriously -- go look up a picture of Tim Roth, and try telling me he wouldn't have been an awesome Snape. I'm just saying.
Tomorrow it all comes to a definitive end with the release of the last movie, "Deathly Hallows Part 2." Everything I've read about that movie makes it sound like it should be a great conclusion to the whole thing, and I'm very excited to see it, both to enjoy the movie itself and to just put the last bit of closure on what has been a great story to follow. But is it Midnight Showing Worthy?
I think I'd rather wait for a quieter early afternoon matinee tomorrow, when the theater won't be overtaken by fandom enthusiasm, and I can enjoy it all in the same personal way I have throughout the series. I've waited for the end for this long. Pretty sure I can make it a few more hours.
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