Star Wars at the Office

I’ve been a Star Wars fan ever since I was a kid. A lot of folks my age will say the same; we saw the movies, we had the toys, and anything we could find around the house – a yard stick, a scrap of PVC pipe, the empty cardboard gift wrapping tube – became a light saber.

No, I'm not jealous that you got the large size Jawa. (That's me and my brother in 1980)

I got my first "real" Star Wars prop when I was in elementary school. Around 3rd grade, I think. It was a two-piece, hard plastic Darth Vader helmet that I’d seen at Paramount Theatrical Supply on Colonial Drive (anyone else remember that place?) and it cost almost $40.

At the tender age of 8 or 9, that might as well have been $40,000.

My parents had worked hard to teach me and my brother about life, work, and the value of things. We always had to have some kind of job like delivering papers or mowing lawns in the neighborhood to earn our own money, and we had to buy whatever we wanted (even gifts for our friends when we went to their birthday parties) out of our own pockets.

So I worked and saved and scraped and after a few months (any idea how long that is to a 3rd grader?) I actually had enough. Mom drove me downtown and I marched in there, slapped that money on the barrel head, and became the proud owner of the most amazing thing in the history of the universe.

That's the one. And yeah, me again.

Over the years I've gotten older but I don't pretend to be any less of a kid. And even though it is a place of business, the Odyssey Creative office is like a club house to me; it's full of cool stuff (video cameras and lights, shiny computers with big screens, movie posters and props), and a lot of my favorite people are here.

Plus, we get to do things like this:

Yeah, that's right...tomorrow (Friday, May 2nd) we're working/playing with the fine folks at Macbeth Photography to do a sweet, sweet Star Wars themed First Friday Foto event.

For essentially my whole life, I've never stopped working for more than a few days at a time. Like I said, my parents taught me well and it stuck. But I do what I love in an environment that I love. I've somehow been able to bring so many of my own dreams to life, all wrapped up with my work, that when I look back on all the things I wanted as a kid? I realize that I have them, writ large, as a pseudo-adult.

And that makes me luckier than any kid getting a large size Jawa action figure for his birthday.

See you tomorrow?

-Marc