Where would we be if...?

Flashback Friday--a good idea.

Today I've been thinking about my friends S&C, the ones I met up with last weekend to see Pirates. I met them back in 2000, under unusual circumstances. If not for those circumstances, there's no way we'd have ever met each other--C works at the Holocaust Museum downtown DC, procuring items for the museum and other stuff I'm sure. She is an artist trained and very smart. S works for--well, I'm not really sure, but it has something to do with Homeland Security and Immigration. She deports people, as she told her neighbor from somewhere south of the border who's fixing up her house to hold far more than just the 5 people she says will live there. Very smart woman, weilds a sword--S and C took Gum-Do, Korean Sword fighting. I couldn't because both these women live in Fairfax county and that's where the school is--and I'm not about to chance the beltway on Wednesday evenings to get to VA by 7:00pm. All three of us are single, professional women, who otherwise wouldn't have met, if not for Star Wars.

All three of us were members of an online group called alt.fan.wedge (AFW), fans of Wedge Antilles, from Star Wars (the only non-main character Lucas carried through all three original films to give the audience a sense that other people do survive big battles, not just Our Heroes). My friend B introduced me to the group (I knew her from church, so not unique that I would have known her), along with a few other groups. Well, in November of 2000, K, the Prophetess of the Animist Warrior God known as Wedge Antilles, (yes, these are the things we come up with) was coming to DC for a visit with her friend Morwen (I can use her name because it's not her real name anyway). So a call was sent out to the group, a place was arranged for us to meet, and B was even willing to go just not by herself. So we went together. We took the metro to a restaurant in DC (I couldn't even tell you where it was now) and met up with about 9 others at a restaurant in DC, including S and C. We read X-Wing books and did the drinking game (water and soda only--most of them were underage and the rest of us were driving, although C may not have been). A little daring to go into DC to meet people we'd only talked to online, but B and I were together, she'd met K before, and we figured it would be fine, and it was. After this initial meeting we tried holding 'meetings' of the DC chapter of AFW, and there were about 9 of us at the largest gathering. We would try to run Role Playing Games in the Star Wars Universe, but after our numbers dwindled to just S, C, and me, we decided that wasn't really working anymore. By then we were friends, and we got together to do things. S and I went to Star Wars Celebration II, all three of us went to Star Wars Celebration III, and even now we get together to go to movies and the Renaissance Festival and other things.

It's good to have friends from all walks of life. I have a very diverse group of friends.