Platform 9 3/4

I've always loved movies on the big screen.  The dark room, the overwhelming sensory input - sight and sound - the opportunity to check out for a couple of hours and reset whatever was going on in your head before it started.  It's just not the same on a DVD or your cell phone.

My earliest movie experience was seeing "How the West Was Won" at age 7 with my two brothers - I remember almost nothing, except that it was incredibly long and had an intermission.  In retrospect, I wonder what my parents were up to…. In the following years, I fell in love with Julie Andrews in "Sound of Music" and "Mary Poppins".  I wanted to sing and dance and be an actress and those movies fueled my imagination and were the soundtrack for my life.

Fast forward through many, many movies, to 2001, we began a decade of near annual releases focussed on going back to school - something that reminds me of September and autumn - with Harry Potter waiting at Platform 9 3/4 to go off to Hogwarts.  I thoroughly enjoyed the Harry Potter book series, reading the first few aloud to my youngest son before he was able to read them on his own.  And then it became a bit of a family affair with several generations of us sharing the books and movies.  It was a wonderful run of the beautiful English/Welsh/Scottish countryside and our imaginations all those years.  It was sad when it was over.