What I Learned From the Star Wars "Trili-gon"

The way everything ended up we had about 7 boys and definitely 3 girls spend the night. However, this is not accounting for the "floaters" who came and then had to leave for other events or those who were at other commitments and then came late ... and left later. In fact, one boy who couldn't make it Saturday showed up at 8:00 on Sunday and stayed until 3;00 with the other hangers-on.

I was told we were "brave" and that it sounded "chaotic" but not really at all. One dad who teaches at the school called and asked Hannah, "So how is it over there? Cats and dogs sleeping together? Boys and girls doing the same? How about your parents? Are they watching the movies with y'all?" Ummm, boys and girls in separate parts of the house and though I drifted in every so often to see which part of the movie was on we didn't intrude tooo much. The good thing about this gang is there is a lot of positive peer pressure. They really were there to watch the movies, play "Collector's Edition Classic Star Wars Trivial Pursuits", etc. And, we trusted Hannah that if anything untoward happened she'd alert us to the situation.

It was a lot of fun. I especially enjoyed having a bunch of boys around since the ratios always have been reversed until this weekend. So, what I learned:

• You can never, ever have too much food around when you are feeding 7-10 teenage boys. Three 16" pizzas disappear as if they never existed. 6 quarts of popcorn likewise. Four liters of pop are gone in four hours. Good thing I had emergency supplies of pretzels, Doritos, etc or they would have wasted away to nothing.


• A chocolate sheet cake creatively decorated with crossed blue and red light sabers and "May the Force be with you" (all done by Rose) is NOT regarded as dumb and, in fact, may result in having people "call" the pieces of cake with the light sabers.
  
• If you have a gallon of whole milk for breakfast, you will get called a hero by many and hugged by three boys you do not even really know. Girls will smile and be thankful, but not as openly appreciative.


• No one can get every ounce of enjoyment out of Star Wars like a bunch of guys. My first clue was hearing the discussion begin as they trooped down the hall to watch Star Wars, "So do you think there is any significance to the fact that Luke starts out with a blue light saber and then winds up with a red light saber?"


• StarWarz Gangsta Rap is seriously funny.


• I'm not sure exactly which demographic Gray's Anatomy is appealing to but I was interested to overhead one of the guys saying at breakfast that the ads looked "raunchy" to a chorus of agreement. If teenage guys don't think all those sexy shenanigans in the ads look good ... but maybe they're too smart for the show ... or at least the ads. Haven't seen it but it was the "raunchy" factor that turned me off too.


• George "Michael Moore" Lucas says that the over-25 crowd likes the three older movies while the under-25 crowd like the newer movies. He wishes. Only parts of the newer two movies are acceptable and they were all discussed at length. I mean Darth Maul is very cool and how about when Yoda whoops up on the evil count? Good moments but they can't make up for that tragic romance (and we're not talking Romeo and Juliet kind of "tragic"). This doesn't mean that no one is going to see the third movie. Everyone will see it with high hopes that something will finally measure up to the first three.


• Tom is one savvy guy. We were talking later about how much we liked these kids and how nice they are (while still being normal ...). I was shocked when he said, "Yeah, you can see no one has any shenanigans in mind. No one is going out to their car every 10 minutes or anything." Gee, I hadn't even thought of something like that. But he was quietly assessing everything. So nice to learn new things about each other even after so many years.


• Dallas is a much smaller town than you'd think. Turns out one boy's mother dated someone who later married someone who was a very good friend of mine many years ago. The guy is Jewish and keeps kosher while my friend is Baptist (?). This leads to my next point...


• Theology teaching moments come up at the oddest times. During the "break" with everyone standing around eating cake and drinking milk in kitchen when that whole Jewish guy who married my friend thing came up ... the boy said, "Yeah and she's always telling him he's going to hell because he's not a Christian." Just didn't sound like my friend but we haven't been in touch for years. Anyway, then he went on to say, "Just like my 1st grade teacher and my confirmation teacher talking about how non-Catholics are going to hell." Which was my chance to leap in and say that was totally against Church teachings and tell about the American bishop who recently was excommunicated for preaching that very thing. All were much impressed and I heard this being peripherally talked about later.


• When it came to going to Mass the next morning I surprised even myself by suddenly lowering my "cool mom" factor several degrees when I suddenly began quizzing each and every kid there, "Are you Catholic? Then when are you going to Mass today if you don't go with us?" Which led to more "non-Catholics WON'T go to hell" talk.

Bottom line, these are good kids, they were a heck of a lot of fun to be around, and when Hannah has her "Firefly" shindig later this summer I'll buy lots more pizza.