Harry Potter

Our obsession with Harry Potter began Christmas 1999. Mandy received the first book, The Sorcerer's Stone as a present from my parents. Thus began our complete love for all things Harry Potter. At that time Mandy didn't care for reading. She was good at it, just hated it. I had to force her to read with me for an hour every night. We took turns each reading one page. It was excruciating. It reminded me of my childhood hate of reading and sitting in the living room being forced to read aloud.

And then there was Harry. I can still remember that evening that it all changed. We usually read after I washed the dinner dishes. After washing the dishes I went into the living room and caught Mandy with her nose in the book, reading of her own free will. She quickly apologized for getting ahead of me in the book. I think she had read a couple of chapters, on her own. From that day to this, Mandy is a voracious reader. She has read all the Harry Potter books multiple times. And everything else. She can read on trains, planes and automobiles. She can read all night, she can read all day, sometimes I have to force her to eat and sleep, because she wants to read.

After reading the first book we were excited to start the second book. Luckily for us that book had already been published. My parents insisted on buying the second book for us, so we had to wait for it to come in the mail. We read the second book and low and behold the third book was about to be released in July of 2000. We bought an advanced copy and were so excited that we stood in line at midnight in order that we could read it as soon as humanly possible. Mandy had never stayed up that late, but we read the first chapter at about 1am. Our Harry Potter tradition is to read all the chapter titles and look at all the pictures and then read the first chapter. Always together and aloud. Mandy went from wanting me to read everything to wanting me to read nothing in the few months since the first reading of the first page of Harry Potter.

After the third book we had to wait forever for the fourth book. I am pretty sure that the fourth book was published before the release of the first movie, but I am not 100% sure, because I am not obsessed, Mandy I am sure knows. Having to wait, she discovered so many other books and series and she is always reading.

When the first movie came out in theaters, we were living in Italy. The base theater was awful and we were horrified at the prospect of seeing Harry Potter in that theater. Plus, while the movie came out Thanksgiving weekend in the States it wouldn't come to the base in Italy until who knows when. Now I am not saying that we went to London just to see the Harry Potter movie. I mean London is nice. Mandy and I had never been there. Ryan Air has plane tickets from Italy to London that cost our entire family about $150 round trip. We found a B & B that was very reasonable. So we went to London to watch the movie. We were so disappointed. Jeff was pretty upset that we were disappointed. Our love of Harry Potter was not adequately portrayed in that first movie. Jeff, who has never read a single Harry Potter book, loved the movie, Mandy and I hated it. We are better now, but we were both almost in tears by the end of it. You just cannot do those books justice on the big screen.

Here we are years later and the fourth book came out as a movie. Here in Japan we wont get the movie at the base theater until who knows when. But, here in Japan, we can go to a Japanese movie theater and watch the movie in English with Japanese subtitles for about $10 per person. Yesterday was opening day of Harry Potter here in Japan, and yesterday we arrived at the mall with the movie theater 5 hours early to stand in line and watch the fourth movie.

So we bought our tickets and we wandered around the mall for four hours. We ate, we browsed, we played air hockey, and we watched the movie. It was so great. I don't know if it is that I am over the fact that it can't be exactly like the book, or if it is the fact that I read the book so long ago I forgot most of it. I am old. Mandy can point out every detail that was different, like the color of Hermione's dress at the Yule ball. But to me the movie was great and so worth the wait. Much cheaper to go to a local theater than to fly to another country too. We did go to see movie two and movie three at the base theaters, one in Italy and the other here in Japan. Man, they are putting out those movies at an amazing pace, the books too. So Mandy has grown up with Harry Potter. He brought to her one of her most treasured gifts, the love of reading. We will be forever grateful to JK Rowling and her amazing boy Harry.