The First Weekiversary
At this time a week ago, I was sitting alongside my compadres-in-dorkdom, Eric and BJ, and we were eagerly anticipating the start of “the event of the century” as our fearless leader of the “Fellowship of the Trilogy” called it. Though we were still 2 hours away from start time, the blood was flowing, our eyes were wide, and thoughts of “what are we doing here?” were running rampant in our minds. As we looked around us, normalcy was very often not the first word that came to mind to describe what we saw, though there were exceptions. One of us remarked that there were more females than we thought there might be, many of them without a dorkus companion on their arm. (Not that we were looking). There were hobbits, elves, and rangers among us. We were haunted by the presence of a screeching Ringwraith. We laughed at the over-sized toilet paper roll Dark Tower, complete with the Eye of Sauron.
We even had Peter Jackson.
Good or bad, these were the people (and things) we chose to spend the next 14 hours of our life with. These were good people.
By the time the first movie was about to begin, we all remembered why we were there. Since October, we had all been imagining this moment and it had finally arrived. Gone were the doubts of staying awake, we had to stay awake. Gone was the worry of hunger, we would find food. The hour was upon us. It was time to begin our journey with the Fellowship of the Ring. No, it was time to begin our journey with the Fellowship of the Trilogy.
At the end of the day (well really it was the beginning of the next day), we hadn’t made new friends. Though we had spent the last 12 hours in a dark room with 200 people, it was all about the movies. Sure, the multitude bonded over the commercials we had seen before all three movies (“It’s ‘delux’ son. It isn’t that hard!”). We even struck up a brief conversation with the ladies next to us about the rank odor of the room. But through it all, our eyes remained fixed on one goal, seeing this amazing story come to its natural end.