June 14, 2016

The weekend of June 4th and 5th was pretty heavy duty.  I think it took me several days to recuperate from that.

I took June 3rd off as a vacation day to go to the Joliet Historical Museum for set up for Joliet Star Wars Day.  I packed the truck up the night before with the exception of Artoo who did not fit.  On Friday morning, I had a member stop at the house to load Artoo in his car and we made our way to the Musuem.  Set up went very smoothly as there were several other Nar Shaddaa Base members there to assist with all the unloading and set up.

The next morning it was a very early rise to suit up and head to downtown Joliet.  The weather was threatening rain and possible storms, but the mood was still positive.  The parade did happen because the rain had held off for a few hours.  The parade associated with this event is very short, but the streets were lined with a lot of people.  I spent mostly all day at the NSB/RL table selling "hold out blasters" that a bunch of us purchased as our charity endeavor this year.  Sales were very brisk and we ended up selling out of the little blasters found at the Dollar Store.  We made $650.00 off the sale of those blasters and the $$ was sent to a member who is sick and has mounting medical expenses.

We had a good number of members from other Bases show up and they all reported having a good time and I think that many of them will try to make it again next year.  Hopefully, as the years go by we will have more and more Rebels in attendance.

This year our display featured our Pilots and we certainly had a good variety of different Pilot costumes.

I had my traditional one beer at the "after party" but didn't stay really long as the next day was to be yet another big event.  The great thing about this year is that I did not have to take down and haul home the display.  The display was left at the Historical Museum where it will be "in residence" for the entire month of June.

On June 5th, I took part in a very special SW event for a Make A Wish recipient at the DePaul Theater of the Arts on the north side of Chicago.  The MAW boy wanted to become a Jedi.  Anytime I have to go into the city, I always allow extra time so I left pretty early.  I also brought along an extra Jedi costume for someone else to wear.

The whole thing was a little surreal.  We did a walk through on stage of the program that was put together by another member of NSB.  We barely got back to the dressing rooms and were told that the MAW boy had arrived.

I had made the boy's Jedi costume for this and was relieved when he was suited up in it that it pretty much fit him.

One part of the program was lightsaber training and all of the Jedi were on stage for that with dim lights, lightsabers humming and going through "training".  

After the little boy was declared a Jedi, he was knighted and then taken around to meet all of us.

The event went rather well and by the post at the MAW Foundation, our little program was successful.