Saturday, July 7, 2007

Dork City Rockers

Perhaps I have no room to talk, since I just returned from my second trip to the library since last we spoke. This second trip was so Maya and I could check out a Harry Potter party they were setting up in the auditorium. The auditorium at the main branch is actually just a clearing, directly open to the rest of the labyrinth. I'm shocked at how many noisy things they set up in there, and not-so-secretly, I adore their abject shirking of convention.

They had these display cases of magic potions and pickled spell ingredients. The "Dragon Dung" was in reality hot dogs suspended in food coloring, which probably speaks volumes inversely about the true nature of hot dogs. Then there was this big trivial pursuit board, and teams were drawn out of the gooney-cute adults in attendance (I'm hoping they all did actually arrive with children and were not just 40-yo Harry Potter fans. I mean, like a book if you want, really, but, dude...) and a delightful gaggle of sullen teenagers in varying degrees of HP regalia. We are a Pokemon household, and Maya is too young, by her own estimation, for Harry Potter, so we were really out of our element. The kids had to answer an HP trivia question, and then roll this oversized die and move around this giant Trivial Pursuit style board taped to the floor. It was like a Milton-Bradley cheap movie tie-in game brought to life!

Problem was, there were 16 kids playing, so many a hapless kid was stranded 2 spots from home base for 16 turns. The grave will come quicker than a third turn to some of these hood rats. The sullen kids were desperate to be seen as "over it" simply dropping the die in teen glory insouciance or rolling their eyes as they mumbled back some totally easy Hogwarts trivia, oblivious to the fact that, er, you are voluntarily at a Harry Potter party at the library on a Saturday afternoon, G. You are allotted no frontin'.

We ditched soon enough. Maya was really only concerned about the cupcakes set at the far end, so instead we got some good old coloring sheets from the kids section, and then Maya got her first library card. I'd rather forgotten there were kids' library cards. My innocent childhood back in the 1840's found me walking across out little town in Illinois to the library when I was just a little older. Rather dumbfounding, since she will hardly go in the back yard by herself.

The freak scene in the auditorium did give me a glimpse at the future of my daughter in awkward clothes, bad hair color and being sullen about something she is voluntarily doing. I would have been total Hogwarts material in my tween years. It was hard enough finding anyone to play D&D who wasn't somehow a bigger loser than myself, I can't imagine how validating having the greatest cottage industry in publishing history aimed squarely at me would be.

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