Claire has been curious about Star Wars for some time now, especially with the boys in her class playing and discussing Star Wars every day. She has actually been somewhat confused by the whole thing. What is “R3D2”? Is Han Solo a good guy or a bad guy? Is Darth Vader a person or a robot?

At long last, some of the mystery was folded back tonight, her last day as a four-year-old, as chance would have it. Claire finally got to see (some of) Star Wars! The original Episode IV, aka Star Wars: A New Hope, happened to be on TV just before dinner. Normally we turn off the TV for dinner, but tonight we let it run and even rearranged the TV so that we could watch during dinner as a special treat. You just can’t pass up the original Star Wars falling right in your lap like that!

From past experiences, we thought Claire might be frightened by the movie, and Kit went to great lengths to explain that what she was seeing was not real. We talked a lot about how the director would say “cut!, and they would stop filming. Then everyone would change out of their costumes and go have coffee together, even the storm troopers and the good guys.

Claire was at times little scared by the movie. She continued to be frightened whenever Darth Vader appeared, even if he was just standing there. But mostly she was engrossed by the movie. Her eyes were glued to the TV all the way to the end. She said Princess Leia was beautiful, and we stressed that she was also brave. Claire liked when the good guys stole storm trooper uniforms so they could sneak around the Death Star unfettered. “They fooled the bad guys!”, she was quite fond of saying. When the movie was over, she asked us to record it so she could watch it again, but we told her it was a special or “sometimes” movie, and the next morning it was back to watching Arthur.