My Mother's Awful Secret, Kept For Thirty-Eight Years

So the wise among you will remember this tattoo from December:


That, my friends, is a Star Wars tattoo, which my wife and I got because we met in a Star Wars chat room.
We met in a Star Wars chat room because I had seen Star Wars well over seventy times in the theater.  In fact, I saw Star Wars fifty-seven and a half times before I was thirteen.
And that was, you youngsters, in the days before your fancy-schmancy DVDs or VHS tapes or even reruns existed.  Back in the day, if you wanted to see a movie and you were a young kid, you had to bug a relative into taking you.
I bugged my relatives fifty-seven and a half times.
The half was, I am only semi-ashamed to say, when I got my grandparents to take me.  They’d misread the matinee as 12:30 instead of 1:30, so we showed up an hour early, so Little Ferrett somehow convinced them to go into the theater early, watch the Death Star Trench Run, and then watch the entire movie again.
It is safe to say that Teeny Ferrett was a relative-bugging machine.  Imagine the challenge of convincing a relative, who has almost certainly seen Star Wars with you at least once because, well, hardly anyone has that big a family, and then saying, “Uh, hey, I know we’ve done this twice before and you know I’ve seen this movie forty times, but…
“…could we do it again?”
So my Star Wars bugging game was on fleek.
But the title of this entry was about my Mom’s horrible secret, which I only discovered when she arrived this Thursday and she told me how much she’d enjoyed The Force Awakens, and…
She should probably see Star Wars.
MY MOTHER HAD NEVER SEEN STAR WARS.
Let me repeat that:

My mother

had never seen

Star Wars.

Which, if you think about it, showcases my mother’s sheer manipulative genius.  Can you imagine what it took to not only withstand the pleadings of an iron-willed kid who would not shut up about this movie, but quietly maneuver every other relative to see this damn movie without once having to go yourself?
Jesus Christ, Machiavelli probably would have broken down at some point and said, “All right, I’ll go.”
Yet my Mom danced among the requests for my entire childhood, only now thinking, “Maybe it’s time.”
So we showed her last night.  She was sleepy, and having an allergic attack, but we got to the Death Star escape and she said, “PAUSE THIS MOVIE, I GOTTA PEE.”
She didn’t wanna miss a minute.
So she liked it.  Which is good.  Because as my friend Angie said, it’s so hard to rehome mothers once they get to that age.