What Went Down In Rogue One

I was already seated, my man on my right, my refreshment on my left side cup holder since I’m a leftie, when the group of young men came over and seated themselves next to me. My neighbor almost crushed my cardboard cup with his enormous Canada Goose jacket, so I quickly rescued my drink and told him to watch it with my most customer-servicy, gentle and mean-no-harm voice.

The strange young man with his huge red coat was, of course, a right-handed man, and I only realized this as he was settled into his seat and started to instinctively place his own drink on top of mine. Since I had got there first, I exercised my right to choose a side of the two cup holders, but later on, as I had failed to act and replace my cup on the right side holder with his near miss of a cup placement, I wondered during the dreadful trailer of The Great Wall, if I had sometime heard that the cup holding arrangement in theaters was actually made for the right-handed, and therefore I probably had disturbed the cup holding policy of my entire row by refusing to move my cup and forcing the young man with the giant coat to place his cup on the wrong side where he would have to constantly reach awkwardly with his right hand.

While I was pondering this, the movie began, as did my two-and-a-half hour marathon of secretly checking every time my right-hand neighbor reached for my cup, assuming in the midst of action that it was of course his cup, and only at the last nanosecond realizing that it wasn’t, if he would this time actually take a sip from my cup. It wasn’t that I was very annoyed, it was more like an anthropological game. How hard do our habits stick, mine too, because in about half way through the film I caved and changed my cup on my right side, between my man and myself, freeing the rightful place for my strange neighbor with the gigantic jacket to place his cup. I then proceeded to try to grab the nothing that was there on my left side, numerous times, until, realizing that my right-hand neighbor would not understand that I was trying to give him possession of what was already his cup holder, I finally replaced my drink into its original place.

The confusing game of Cups aside (Note obvious Friends reference), by the time the movie wrapped up, I began to feel tears swelling up in my eyes. Looking around me, I saw the room at the eleven a.m. Wednesday premiere half full, myself and my significant other and my new friend from the cup holding game amid the maybe two hundred or so eager others.

As the closing credits began to roll, I was crying. Wasn’t it marvelous to be part of something this big, to be part of this chunk of Star Wars fans who had cleared their busy schedule in the middle of the week to participate in this event, and in the middle of the week before Christmas week, I might add, when god knows everyone has their hands full as it is? I had been party to this cinematic saga in movie theaters since Jar Jar Binks, the most forgettable of all Star Wars creatures in my book, and with the original three in the video cassette, and later, in the DVD remastered form, since I don’t remember when.

This saga would continue every Christmas until the end of my natural life, now that Disney owned it, and that was, in the end, all good. I had read about how people were panicking over the loss of coherence and integrity of the universe now that the floodgates were opening to an endless string of prequels and sequels, and perhaps I initially had panicked, too. But wasn’t Star Wars a bit like Dickens’ A Christmas Carol? I watch a different version of this story every Christmas.

I left my 3D-glasses in the bucket outside the doors, still wiping away my tears. It was the first day of my period this month.