Blinded By The 'Light

Pink Floyd--"Eclipse" (mp3)

I'm nominating my wife for "Mother Of The Year."

No, she didn't rescue children from a burning building, start a charity, suckle an unknown baby at her breast, or coach a soccer team. Instead, she pulled a Twilight all-nighter. That's right, armed with only a pillow, from 6PM until 2:45AM, she went into self-imposed lockdown inside of the Rave Motion Pictures theater with all of the fans, aficionados, creepers, and sad human beings for whom the Twilight books and movies has engendered a purpose.

If, for some reason, you don't know the Twilight series, it revolves around a chaste love triangle between Edward, the moral vampire, Bella, the heavy-lidded heroine, and some buff psuedo-Native American guy who never wears a shirt and can turn into a werewolf at the drop of a hat.

Here's the timetable:

6PM-7PM She and my daughter get there early to "get good seats," according to my daughter. "I know these people," she said, "We have to get there early." (Luckily, they are armed with snacks I have prepared for them--quesadillias, hot dogs, cheese and crackers, peanuts, and homemade ginger cookies. Hey, I've got to get in the story somewhere, so you don't think I'm just sitting at home enjoying a night alone.)

7PM-11:15PM Watch Twilight and New Moon back-to-back uninterrupted in preparation for the "main event."

(Meanwhile, outside, those fans who are not die-hard enough begin to line-up at about 9PM in preparation for the "main event.")

11:15PM-12:15AM Wife sleeps in preparation for the "main event."

12:15AM-2:25AM Watch Eclipse as one of the very first few thousand people in Chattanooga to see it.

2:25AM-2:45AM Drive home.

Why, you ask? Who in their right mind would do this, you ask? Answer: today's Mom Of The Year. "There will be a lot of moms there with their daughters," my daughter said. What she didn't say was that these other moms dragged their too-young kids here, bought them the biggest concession combo packs they could find--drink, nachos, popcorn, candy, told them to sit down and be quiet. If you know anything about the Twilight phenomenon, you know that it skews evenly between young women and girls and women over 40, with only slight little overlaps of women from 20-40 and boys (see biggest concession combo packs above).

But my wife wasn't one of those. She didn't know a thing about Twilight until she walked into the theater. See, my two daughters typically go to these kinds of events together, but my younger daughter is out of town at a beach house in South Carolina. So what does today's Mom Of The Year do? She steps in. She agrees to go. She takes one for the team. She cannot stand to see her daughter disappointed.

(Wise Old Dad's suggestion to Daughter: "Why don't you just wait until your sister comes home and go see it then?" This was met with an evil glare that morphed into outright disbelief.)

Now, my wife is part of the phenomenon, and what a phenomenon it was. She says she enjoyed herself and, in fact, came out strongly as a member of Team Edward, even though both of her daughters are Team Jacob.

At midnight, the manager of the Rave announced that he was proud to say that every ticket had been sold. Not every ticket in the theater my wife and daughter were in, not every ticket for a couple of spillover screens, every seat at the Rave was full! All totalled, that is some 4300 seats! At midnight! On a Tuesday. (If you know where the Rave is, it must operate in the best of times at only about 30-40% capacity, because my wife said that the parking lot was full all the way down to that drop-in medical care facility past where the K-Mart used to be!)

Despite my kind of tongue-in-cheek tone here, I'm very proud of my wife. I could not do what she did. I could not sit in a chair that long. I could not watch three of those movies back to back. I could not get up and go to work the next morning.

And I do think, in the larger context, this little slice-of-life is indicative of the ways we parent these days, both good and bad. We do not want our children to be disappointed about something they have looked forward to; we do not want them to be left out of the major trends sweeping through their childhoods. We want them to fit in. We want them to be conversant in the pop culture of the day. And so we make extreme sacrifices of time, energy, weekends, vacations, money. And, yes, some of us make the ultimate sacrifice--the Twilight marathon.

Let's see Mother Teresa do that. And God help us if they are planning one of these events when Peter Jackson's The Hobbit comes out. That one will fall on me.