So I have a huge problem with the theme of this week's issue. Basically, I've been begging for this to happen since I joined The Mirror staff freshman Fall and had given up all hope that the "Harry Potter Issue" would ever come to be. So I wrote about my beloved HP for an early column and even agreed to be photographed as the biggest tool The D's seen since that time there was an article on uncharacteristically large tools. (I have faith there was once such an article.)
And now the moment I've been waiting for has arrived and I find myself at a loss. I've crammed as many Potter puns ("Dementwhores?" Genius.) and Hermione harping (I'm 'hursting myself until her graduation if she transfers here) as I could muster because I just didn't think I'd have another chance. And now this.
It's cruel. I honestly don't know what new things I could say that won't overlap with the other stories in this issue. That, plus I've recently realized that I've been far too liberal with the dissolution of my street cred via this column, and writing a treatise on why I'd give up my first born to go to the Triwizard Tournament would put one too many nails in my coffin. So, I'm gonna defy all expectations and NOT write about Harry Potter this week. Instead, I choose to write about my mother.
Now, you might be thinking, "OMG I HATE YOU HOW CAN YOU DO THIS?!" But you're probably not. Unless you're my mother, who loves Harry Potter more than J.K. Rowling herself. She's read the series forward and backwards. (Literally backwards when the last book came out, she read them in reverse order.) When the first movie was released, she actually forced me to skip school (I may not have put up much of a fight) so we could see the 9 a.m. showing because the midnight show would be "too loud to concentrate" and she simply could not digest any form of lunch without having seen it.
This year, on Nov. 19, she came up to Dartmouth solely to stop me from seeing "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One" without her. Four days later, when I arrived home for Thanksgiving break, she demanded we see it again in IMAX before I could even unpack. I once heard her mutter "Polyjuice Potion" in her sleep. The woman is obsessed.
But this is my mother. Her proclivities make absolutely no sense and have no cohesive theme. Her references flit so frequently from high-brow to low-brow that she can only be described as "brow." She quotes Shakespeare and "Legally Blonde" in the same sentence. She got mad when I wouldn't listen to her lecture on the Protestant Reformation, yet she got FURIOUS when I argued that Cher's line in "Clueless" was "I must give her props" instead of "snaps." (Mama knows best.) She was visibly embarrassed when I read "Twilight" in her vicinity, yet she let me watch "Dawson's Creek" in fourth grade because she was so engrossed by the pilot episode that she felt it would be hypocritical to allow herself to watch it if my viewing was prohibited.
But that's what makes her so impressive (and borderline schizophrenic). She somehow makes Victorian England amusing and the dissection of Us Weekly intellectually imperative. It's her own form of magic, and it deserves to be written about.
So, in honor of Mother's Day, and especially in honor of all-things-HP, I give you the schmaltziest column since the Schmaltz Factory explosion of '93. (Again, faith.) Because I love my weirdo mother more than I love Ron Weasley (this is a lot).
And because she's probably the only one who is reading this anyway.
