Heart of an Empire

So. Notre Dame won, Florida State won, my sister is engaged :-) and Dragon*Con was great. It's always fun to see all the wild and fabulous costumes, and since they added the YA lit track, I actually feel like I'm doing work! Well...maybe. Work disguised as fun, perhaps.

The Greatest Man in the World and I busted our backsides to get down to the con on Monday morning at 10 so that I could go to a panel with some of the actors from the Harry Potter films. On the schedule, the panel was listed as being in one room, but when I got to that room, I was told it was in a different room, so I hiked over to the other end of the hotel and found...no Harry Potter actors.

What I found was a large poster advertising a film called Heart of an Empire. If you're a Star Wars nerd like me, you might have heard of the Fighting 501st, a group of people around the world who dress up like stormtroopers and clone troopers and various other Imperial folks. They aren't affiliated with Lucasfilm in any way and they aren't a LARP; they just like to dress up like the characters and do various events.

I didn't have anything else I was doing till 11:30, so when one of the filmmakers told me that the Harry Potter thing was cancelled but I was welcome to stay for the screening, I said "Sure."

I'd always thought that grown people dressing like movie characters was a little weird and a little cool at the same time. What I didn't know -- and what most people won't know -- is the impact that someone dressed like a stormtrooper can have on someone else. I won't spoil the movie for anyone, but suffice it to say...I laughed, I cried, it was better than Cats. And I left with a new respect for the power of imagination and of that inventive mythology of George Lucas'.