Star Wars: Celebration 4

I'm sure it would as no surprise to any of you that I'm terribly, terribly disappointed that I'm too busy working on our current film projects to attend this year's Celebration 4, the official 30th anniversary party for pretty much the coolest thing on this planet, Star Wars. I've been to every other Celebration (from Denver and it's muddy airplane hangers to Indianapolis and it's long lines) and am truly saddened that it looks as though I won't be going to this one.

Although, a frenzy of Star Wars nerdery might overtake me and I might just say, "Screw it all," and go anyway. Stranger things have happened to me during my peaks of Star Wars frenzied nerdery (is it any coincidence that I named my son Anakin the same week Attack of the Clones, the epic masterpiece, came out?)

I was, however, truly surprised when, looking at the starwars.com website about the happenings at this next celebration I found this.

Belly-dancing slave Leia's isn't what I'm talking about. That's not much of a big deal.

What surprised me was this:


This photograph, on starwars.com, threw me for a loop. The middle-right Leia. It's my good friend Janine, a Marine long-since deployed and returned from flying planes in Iraq. She's almost as big a nerd as I am. In fact, we met camping out in line for Phantom Menace. In fact, I must have seen Phantom Menace a dozen times (or more) with her. And she co-hosted with me (along with Elias and another friend of ours) an evening of pre-Attack of the Clones entertainment on the eve of it's release at a grand old 750-seat movie palace. The four of us MC'd a costume contest and had a really rad bout of "Beat the Geeks at Star Wars trivia."

If you hadn't guessed, we were the geeks.

Here we are together at Celebration 3.

Since she joined the Marines we don't get to talk all that much. Perhaps I'll call her tomorrow (along with all of her other friends and family that saw this photo.)

And in a bizarre sidenote: The Leia on the left in that starwars.com photo posed for pictures with my little brother (the one that was in "The Fleapit Three") at Comic Con last year:


And I guess what I'm saying is that the bottom line is this: Anybody interested in carpooling out to LA in a week or two?

Seriously....