![]() In my bedroom alcove, just theoretically wide enough to fit two chest-high bookshelves face to face and wedge a gawky tween in between them, I turned the exposed imitation wood shelf tops into theaters of perpetual war, pitting the Galactic Empire against the Rebellion – or, rather, the intricately detailed, now little-remembered “Micro Collection” playsets of the Episode IV Death Star vs. I slept in the implied safety and near-swaddling embrace of an Empire Strikes Back bedroom suit that saw me all the way through childhood. Afterward, we ate lunch at McDonald’s and played, en masse and single-minded, at a local park, pretending the wooden fort, with its suspension bridge, slides, and turrets, was Jabba the Hutt’s opulent pleasure barge, and that a giant rock jutting out of the ground just past the line separating sand from grass was the skiff from which Luke, Han, and Chewie were supposed to sacrifice themselves to the great and powerful Sarlacc…but rebelled. Breathless speculation at the bus stop morphed into giddy anticipation on the rides both to and from school, before giving way to unalloyed joy in the movie theater. The powers that be felt it would be the most efficient way to sate the thermonuclear excitement of a bunch of little hellions, and possibly the only ruse by which to attempt to focus their attention on schoolwork the entire rest of the week. ![]() My third grade class descended on the local mall on a glorious spring Monday morning in 1983 like a swarm of army ants, on a school-sanctioned field trip to see Return of the Jedi. “This is the ship that made the Kessel Run in fourteen parsecs?” ![]()
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