Wookies and Jawas

There's a theater in downtown Seattle called the Cinerama. It's one of those old theaters that has a big wide curved screen and was able to show the big 70mm movies. In recent years, the Cinerama was purchased by Paul Allen, the accidental billionaire cofounder of microsoft, and he had it fully updated and modernized. These days it always seems to be one of the few theaters that has a midnight showing for whatever new big movie that comes out. Episode III is one of those movies.

Yesterday, I happened to be in downtown Seattle for a training class and was walking along 5th avenue under the monorail. Across the street, the long line of devoted Star Wars fans queued around the block of the Cinerama theater, many of which were decked out in costumes representing various characters in the movie. I was able to see quite the assortment of wookies and jawas and ewoks and stormtroopers and others whose costumes I couldn't figure out. I heard in the news that the first guy in line had been there since the beginning of the year. Is that some crazy fanatic devotion or what? At the time I saw those folks, they had just about 8 more hours to go until the midnight showing. That's just nutty! I would say "they need to get a life", but then again, this fanaticism seems to be their life.