They ate all of the cake. BIFF’s Star Wars party was a success. We had almost thirty people come out to celebrate the 30th anniversary of my all-time favourite movie. Not too shabby. Kathy Tyers read her favourite scene from Balance Point, and described a bit about the story meeting where she pitched the idea that Luke & Mara should have a child. She considers herself a godmother as a result of her successful efforts. Cindy Turner came out to sing three Star Wars filk songs, and I had the tune for “He’s always a Wookie to me…” going through my head for the rest of the weekend.
I made a couple more contributions to the evening, aside from the cakes, including the Top 30 lines of dialogue improved by replacing one word with “pants.” The best of which was “I find your lack of pants disturbing.” I also polled a number of BIFF members for their memories of Star Wars, and got a very interesting picture of the group.
Half of the respondents named Han Solo as their favourite character, but 50% of them thought his name was really Hans. We ranged in age from 6 to 25 when we saw Episode IV: A New Hope for the first time, but more than 20% of us have never seen the movie in a movie theatre. 43% of our group doesn’t own any Star Wars toys, but I managed to single-handedly skew the results since I confessed to owning more than 50.
36% of our favourite Star Wars memories involved being with other fans. 36% related to the movie itself. 22% didn’t have a favourite memory (of which one declared themselves to really be more of a Trekker), and 6% involved an act of action figure vandalism (something about an epic battle in the microwave).
But the best part of the day was when someone at work (who isn’t really a fan but had listening patiently to me chattering all day about how much I was looking forward to the party) ducked into my office as she left and said “Have a good weekend. May the Force be with you!”
