Sabering the Moments

A couple of weeks ago I got to check off two bucket list items in one evening. On August 30 we got to go to the Hollywood Bowl to see John Williams conducting a tribute to Henry Mancini and Blake Edwards, hosted by Blake Edward's wife, the iconic Julie Andrews. Being both a sci-fi geek and a closet Sound of Music groupie, it was a not-to-be-missed opportunity. I slipped out from work when no one was looking and was able to pick up the family in time to get to the Wilson Park shuttle bus service with time to spare. John Williams always draws a crowd, so the bus was packed. We got seats, but ended up having the kids sit on our laps to free up space for others. It was a hot, bouncy, jolty trip, but we made it without incident, which considering the traffic our Mario Andretti impersonator of a bus driver had to negotiate, was actually an incident in and of itself.

Our seats were in the supplemental oxygen section, which is much better than the low-earth orbit seats we typically get. The kids were all hyped up. They love John Williams music and were all a twitter talking about dinosaurs and Ewoks and unshaven guys with whips. I explained to them that the fun Star Wars music would be at the end of the concert. The first half would be music from movies they probably had never seen. Figuring they wouldn't know or care, we didn't explain much about the Blake Edwards tribute that would be the first half.

After John Williams came out and conducted his never-fail National Anthem, he introduced the evening's narrator, Julie Andrews. The name meant nothing to the kids, but as soon as Ms Andrews came out on stage and was featured in the jumbo-trons scattered throughout the amphitheater, L's eye lit up.

"Daddy," she said. "She looks an awful lot like Maria from Do-Re-Mi!"

"Yes," I agreed. Then she greeted the cheering crowd and launched into the program.

"But Daddy!" L interrupted. "She sounds more like Mary Poppins!"

The kids sat patiently though the first half, enduring Victor/Victoria themes and music from Breakfast at Tiffany's. They were all squeals when John Williams cranked up The Pink Panther theme and the jumbo-tron showed classic Peter Seller's clips. When the lights came up and people started stampeeding to the restrooms, I reminded the kids that the moment they were waiting for was upon them. As I walked with N to the men's room, he was dancing and weaving in and out of the crowd humming John Williams themes and singing snippets from our favorite Moosebutter Star Wars video.

"Kiss a Wookie; kick a droid!
Fly the Falcon through an asteroid,
Till the princess is annoyed..."

I got several encouraging grins from other nerds, impressed that I was raising my child right.

We soon retook our seats and the lights went down. And then, as they say, that's when the magic happened. Over the stage Harrison Ford dodged rolling boulders and ET crested the moon while John Williams whipped the LA Philharmonic into a frenzy of French horns and fanfares. I started to get concerned because N was singing along so loudly, but then I noticed that most of the 40-somethings sitting around us were too, so I stopped stressing. The movie screen spiraled with sweeping aerial shots that only Steven Spielberg could film and John Williams could orchestrate. The audience oohed and ahhhed like they were watching fireworks. I think some of them were even getting teary. (I had a problem at one point with some dust getting in my eye for a bit, but I doubt many of the others had that excuse.)

And then, after a moment's utter silence to highlight the contrast, a blare of trumpets rocked the amphitheater as the John Williams launched into the Star Wars main theme and the audience recoiled back as if driven by a wind of brass. Then, you could almost hear the electric sizzle as all across the bowl thousands of light sabers ripped into action. As Williams pounded out the screwy cacophony of trumpet rhythms and percussion blastings that make up the theme, light sabers careened and clashed across the bowl floor in syncopated swirls of purple and green and red.

Three encores later and utterly exhausted, we made our herdlike way through the mass of humanity (with a few Wookies and other unidentifiable species thrown in) down the slopes and stairs of the Hollywood Bowl to our waiting buses. After a final Falcon-like ride through the alien landscape of late-night LA and South Central we landed at the Torrance Spaceport in Wilson Park. There was no fight left in our Padawans when we finally tucked them in.