19. My Dream Passengers

Tonight is senior bar crawl at the University. All night I’ve been picking up carloads of students going from one drinking establishment to the next. I’ve been kind of an ass to them when they want to squeeze six or seven in the car, and I limit it to four. I let five in once and they left all their fast food trash behind.

 

And while most of them proved to be drunken jackanapes tonight, I did find extreme joy from three young ladies I picked up who were done with their night of revelry.

 

Because one of them got into the car and said, “Oh my God, your license plate is so cool!”

 

She is actually the first passenger to not only have noticed my personalized plate, but also recognized where it was from. One of her friends asked her what it was. The girl told her and then asked her if she know what it meant.

 

The girl paused and replied, “Is it from Iron Man?”

 

“Oh, you are so wrong!” her friend responded and told her to try again.

 

The other girl had no idea and then she asked, “Is it DC or Marvel?”

 

I was impressed that she thought DC or Marvel were the options… I wondered how nerdy these three were!

 

The friend told her that it was DC, to which the friend replied, “Oh I’m a Marvel girl.”

 

This was followed with some discussion about the TV show and the movie that my license plate refers to, which the first girl loved both of. There was some discussion about the issues the movie’s lead had and I told them that Iron Man’s Mr. Downey Jr had also had a number of legal and mental issues early in his career, including heavy drug use and weapons charges. They were surprised, but said they loved the Iron Man movies, especially the second one (which I had to silently disagree with), and so they could forgive him for his past.

 

They then went on to discuss the Marvel universe movies. One said that you should only watch them up through “Ant-Man”. But another commented about how “WandaVision” was really good and there were other good movies and TV series post “Ant-Man”. They all brought up their own examples of things they liked which included projects like “Loki”, “Shang Chi”, “Black Panther”, and decided that maybe there were more good things after “Ant-Man”.

 

Listening to them had me in nerd heaven.

 

They then talked about other nerd things they liked such as the Star Wars movies. They all said that their fathers had gotten them into Star Wars and Marvel when they were young. One of them said one of the first movies they watched with their father was a GI Joe movie.

I decided to chime in and asked them how they felt about Harry Potter? They all squealed with joy. Apparently, Harry Potter is the pinnacle of their fandoms. They went off on the beauty of Harry Potter and how awesome Harry Potter is. They discussed their houses and their patronus’ and I sat and listened. Apparently, the Florida Potter land was so much better than the California one and butter beer was awesome.

Then they asked me if I knew what my house was. I told them that the first time I used the sorting hat it picked me to be a Slytherin, but when I recently tried again on the Potterverse app, I learned that I was now a Gryffindor. They squealed again and once more when I told them my patronus is a weasel.

One of the girls said that she was bullied as a child because she read Harry Potter books. I said if I had been her father, I would’ve come down hard on those bullies. Harry Potter encouraged a generation to read and if these guys had an issue with my daughter reading, then I would have issues with them. I wanted to tell them how a very smart young lady got me into in Harry Potter but they were so embedded in their discussion, I didn’t want to throw in anything new.

I did tell them that my apartment had a number of Harry Potter Lego sets on a bookshelf. One of them, the one who identified my license plate, said she had a bunch of Harry Potter Legos as well. Her father had given them to her over the years. This made me smile, glad to think I wasn’t the only one. She said she couldn’t bring them to campus, though, because there was not enough room in her dorm.

I laughed and told her I had run out of shelf space for my legos.

There was then some discussion about “The Titanic” (as they called the movie) and how one of them had really loved it for a long time and watched it over and over to the point she knew when the naked part was coming and would leave the room and knew when to come back.

She also commented on how she came to her senses about the movie. She had questioned why Rose couldn’t have given Jack a little more room on the piece of wood that saved her. They all agreed that was lame of her.

They then discussed “Twilight”. All three of them were Team Edward, I mumbled that I was Team Jacob, and in unison, they said, “boo!” I did say Pattinson made a good Batman and that got me some points back. They all said that out of everything they’ve discussed those movies are the worst. I agreed wholeheartedly and told them the story of how the only way I could make it through the movies was to make a drinking game out of it. And how drunk I got because I had to take a shot every time Bella whined. They thought that was brilliant.

I also told them that I had once played Hagrid for a Harry Potter book opening. They squealed again.

We then arrived at their destination, and I told them that I appreciated that they were able to identify my license plate. They all thanked me for all the nerdspeak and left the car, giggling and laughing.

It was really nice to hear college kids talk about things like Harry Potter, Marvel, DC, and Star Wars rather than how many drinks they pounded before they passed out or about which boys they liked or didn’t like.