The Line

Do you every become a fan of a TV show or movie and worry that you are getting dangerously close to crossing over the line into terminal fanaticism?

That is how I feel about the TV show LOST. I know I shouldn’t love it as much as a do, but heaven help me, I do. And sometimes I worry that I may be slowly crossing a line over into one of those weird fans that normal people start distancing themselves from.

But luckily for me, I have seen that line and I know what it means to “cross over” into absolute fanaticism. I would like to illustrate with a story, if I may…

Picture it, Provo Utah, a month before StarWars: The Phantom Menace was to open. My roommate and I were obsessed with all things StarWars. Any magazine article that even mentioned “StarsWars” we had to buy it. Any food item that was pressed into StarWars characters we had to eat it. I think we watched the StarsWars movie trailer over a thousand times. But how could we help it? We had waited our whole lives for George Lucas to come clean on his promise to make the prequels to our favorite movies (Let me pause hear to say how disappointed we were after we actually saw the prequels). How could we not be excited?

So one day my roommate came home and said that we should go camp outside the movie theater for a month so we could be the first people in Utah to see Episode I. I was a little reluctant at first, but we filled my backpack with StarWars fruit snacks, and granola bars (why we thought this would sustain us for a month I will never know) grabbed our sleeping bags and headed to the movie theater.

As we pulled into the movie theatre our excitement was quickly silenced by what we saw immediately ahead of us. What we saw friends, and prepare yourselves for this, was a “StarWars Shanty Town”. That’s right, tarps and tents filled with StarWars fans that we would be spending the month with.

Here are some the highlights of what we saw: two young padawan learners who were having an intense lightsaber battle with plastic swords, a grown man putting on Darth Maul make-up, and my personal favorite, the man reading a StarWars comic in a Queen Amadala blow up chair.

We sat in silence for a minute, looked at the mess before us, and then I said, “Sooooooo, you, ah…wanna head home?”

“Yeeeaahhhh” my roommate said slowly, “Leeetttt’ssss head home.”

So my friends, that story always serves as a powerful reminder to me as to what it means to, “cross the line” in regards to crazy fanaticism.

I bring this up because I may, or may not have created a LOST “smoke monster” costume out of a grey leotard, cotton balls and a mobile fog machine.

Have I crossed the line? It’s hard to say.