Muggles' midnight madness

Why the hell do so many grown-ups like Harry Potter?

by David Valdes Greenwood

POTTER-MANIA: is this a significant cultural trend, or just geeks run amok?

It was the guy in the Grimace suit that put it over the top. Until then, last Saturday morning's midnight Harry Potter release party at Curious George Goes to WordsWorth was kind of cool. Well, sort of. I told myself that I was merely participating in a significant cultural trend, a happy literary occasion so profound that the Boston Globe would write about it twice in two days. Looking at the sophisticated adults around me, I could maintain my sense of dignity; with the directors of both PEN/New England the Boston Fetish Flea Market in attendance, this was a smart and sexy crowd. There was no need to be embarrassed. But when some young guy dressed like the huge purple McDonald's character arrived, chortling his way up and down the line, the truth hit me: we were a bunch of geeks.

Worse yet, grown-up geeks. Forget what you read in the papers -- that midnight hour was not about kids. Sure, a few showed up -- including two exhausted-looking sisters whose thirtysomething parents had roused them from sound sleep -- but we're talking tens of children amid hundreds of adults who had nothing better to do than snatch up a copy of the fourth of J.K. Rowling's books about a wizard boy and his irritating muggle (non-wizard) family. The few children in line looked positively embarrassed at their Gen X parents, more than one of whom sported a sort of Gap-goes-Bewitched outfit of cargo pants and black velvet wizard hat. But at least those people had kids in tow, "beards" if you will, to hide the parents' true desires.

I didn't even have a rugrat to hide behind. I just needed that book, wanted it bad enough to stay up past my bedtime and camp out on the sidewalk, in a stance once reserved for trying to get Nirvana tickets. While the line crept forward -- closer to the prize! -- I had plenty of time to consider my descent from mosh pit to Scholastic Book Club. Whatever happened to my old combat boots? When did up-to-the-minute change from stage-diving and clove cigarettes to reading about Quidditch matches and Floo Spells? And how come so many people over 30 know exactly what I mean by that?

At the head of the line, a psych nurse was ushered into the store, but not before a costumed sales clerk thrust a "sorting" hat in her face; by pulling a card from a top hat, customers were assigned to one of the houses at Harry Potter's boarding school. It was a gimmick, right? Clearly meant for children -- so why did I hear a grown man plead, "Please, God, not in Slytherin"? Why was I washed with disappointment to find myself in Hufflepuff? What the hell was wrong with all of us?

Blame it on the '80s: we were raised in the Reagan fantasy, whose happy land we never did find, and the song of our youth was "I don't want to grow up -- I'm a Toys "R" Us kid." Just don't try to tell me a nine-year-old who never worked for a temp agency or a hot-dog stand is going to appreciate escaping to Hogwarts the way we do. The author knows this -- how else to explain the heft of the tome? At 734 pages, its bowling-ball weight could snap a kid's wrist clean. Not to worry: no children were deformed in the Saturday-morning stampede; it was mostly grubby grown-up hands like mine snatching at copies. For once I made it inside the doors, Grimace was forgotten, and so was my sense of cool. I saw the stack of books and dived into the pit.