A Mother's Day Memory

Get the Point!

In May of 1977, I was turning five years old and like many people, I was anxious to see the original “Star Wars” that would soon set global box office records.

On a Thursday evening after a long day of work, my parents decided to take me to see the film at the old Landover Mall in Maryland. The line that night was LONG, longer than anything that I had ever seen up to that point and as we inched along, my excitement grew with each step. When we were close enough for me to see the ticket sellers behind the plexiglass, out of nowhere the manager came out and screamed “STAR WARS IS SOLD OUT” several times to the dismay of EVERYONE standing in line, many of whom sucked their teeth and/or started using a few curse words that I already was quite familiar with growing up in my household. I looked up at my parents with tears in my eyes and asked what it all meant, and Dad grumbled, “it means you’re going to have to see the movie some other time, Boy, now let’s go home—and stop crying!”

Well, I stopped crying until we got into the dark car, and started right back up just as soon as I knew that Dad couldn’t see my face in the backseat.

The next morning, a Friday, as my older sisters were stirring to get ready for school around 6:30 in the morning, I noticed that Mom was still home, which was unusual because back then, she was teaching English and Civics at a junior high school in neighboring Calvert County and usually was already gone by the time we got up to get ready and head to our schools in Prince George’s County.

Mom smiled at me in the hallway and said, “Chuckie, you can lie back down because you’re staying home from school with me today.” She didn’t tell me why, and as one who LOVED to sleep back then and now, I didn’t argue as I figured that I must have had some doctor’s appointment at Walter Reed Hospital. A couple of hours later, Mom woke me up and told me to take my bath and get ready because we were going to see...STAR WARS! I was ecstatic to the point that I could have WALKED to Landover Mall, but that wasn’t necessary.

When we got to the Mall, it must have been around 10:00 in the morning and there weren’t any long lines like the night before. I remember thinking it was odd to smell and eat popcorn that time of day, but we got a large one to share, two Coca Colas, and within minutes, for the very first time I heard the now familiar snare drum and cymbals intro to the 20th Century Fox fanfare as a prelude to John Williams’s classic Star Wars theme and opening crawl. Alas, I finally took “my first steps into a larger world,” as Obi Wan Kenobi famously said to Luke Skywalker on screen during the film’s second act!

Suffice it to say that I have been a Star Wars fanatic ever since, and I smile each time Mom tells her quiz bowl students when teaching pop culture that the only Star Wars she ever saw was the very first one because I remember that she didn’t consider it an inconvenience to mend the broken heart of her little boy on that May evening “a long time ago, at a mall not so far away.”

Lest I forget...