Gone To Potter

I love Harry Potter.

Oh, I’m not a fan of the books. I read the first one, curious to see what all the fuss was about, and I enjoyed it all right, but it seemed like a Star Wars rip-off to me.  Think about it -- orphaned kid, has special powers, lives with his oppressive aunt and uncle who don’t want him to know he has special powers, evil dark lord whose name starts with a V, lovable oversized hairy sidekick . . . I mean, I kept wondering when C3PO and R2D2 were going to show up.

No, what I love about Harry Potter is that every time a new Harry Potter book comes out, people lose their minds.

In the past, I’ve always just sat back and laughed at them from the comfort of home.  This time around, I decided to visit the midnight-release party at my local Borders and get a front-row seat at the insanity.

My friends and I were sitting around talking and drinking beers last Friday night, and thus didn’t actually get motivated to go to Borders until about 11:55, so when we arrived, the stroke of midnight had already passed.

When I saw the ambulance parked in front of the store, though, I worried that with all the excitement, somebody had had a stroke at midnight.

But by the time we found a parking spot -- which I didn’t expect to be so difficult, considering every other store in the strip mall had been closed for hours -- and hiked to the front door, the ambulance was gone, so I don’t know for sure why it had been there.

Once I stepped inside, however, I knew for sure that all the news stories I’d read about Pottermania had failed to truly capture the madness.

The Borders was packed with people -- between every stack, filling every aisle, crowding the staircase.  It looked like a jailbreak at an ant farm.  There were little kids and their parents, teenagers, young adults . . . and about every third one was in costume.  There were kids and adults in capes, wizard hats, red and yellow scarves, big round eyeglasses . . . there was even one little kid with a mohawk -- but I think that was unrelated.

If you were there to get a book, as most of the crowd was, you had to have reserved a book in advance, and when you got to the store, you needed to get a line ticket.  At 12:30 they still hadn’t called ticket number 200.  The teenage girl standing behind me had just drawn ticket number 875.  It was going to be a long night.

With this scene playing out in bookstores across the globe, “the sixth volume of the Harry Potter saga sold more than 8.9 million copies in the first 24 hours it was on sale in the United States and Britain, Reuters reported.  According to publishers, those numbers made it the fastest-selling book in history.

But the release of the new book was just the beginning of the Summer of Harry.

In New Canaan, Conn., a Harry Potter day camp, where kids “immerse themselves in the fictional world of Hogwarts, donning capes and pointed hats and living a few hours each day as if they were students at the school,” drew 120 students.  With camp coming so close on the heels of the release of the new book (it started Monday), “campers were required to sign an oath swearing they would talk about the newest book only with others who were done reading it."

In the UK, “Thousands of unsuspecting motorists have been saved from learning how the latest Harry Potter book ends by quick-thinking officials.”  Reportedly, some literary hooligans in Shropshire draped a banner revealing the ending of the new Potter tome from a footbridge, shocking motorists who reported the banner to the city council.  Said a spokesman for Telford and Wrekin Council, “These pranks are funny but there was a serious point.  There was an issue with road safety and there was the potential for the banner to blow on to traffic.”

But, once again, not everyone’s a fan.  A report surfaced just before the new book’s release that the new Pope is anti-Harry. Gabriele Kuby, author of a book called Harry Potter -- Good or Evil, wrote to the Pope several years ago, when he was just a Cardinal, sharing with him her criticism of the books.  He wrote back, “It is good that you enlighten people about Harry Potter, because these are subtle seductions which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort Christianity in the soul, before it can grow properly.”

Much as I enjoy the idea of him reclined in his La-Z-Boy reading about Hogwarts in that funny hat, I highly doubt the Pope has actually read any of the Harry Potter books.

But I’m sure if he ever did, he’d agree with me about the Star Wars thing.