Laura M. Browning
I called in sick to work once (at a different job) because I’d stayed up all night reading The Hunger Games. I spent my “sick” day reading Catching Fire and Mockingjay.
Genevieve Koski
I spent the summer of 2003 working as an unpaid intern at a magazine in New York, a hideously expensive endeavor that required getting a part-time job selling digital cameras at Best Buy in order to keep myself fed… and in order to buy that year’s Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix, whose release date I’d had circled on my calendar for roughly two years. I wasn’t going to let a silly thing like work interfere with that. After standing in line to purchase the book at 12 a.m.—the first, but definitely not last time I would do such a thing—and reading right through the night, I continued to binge throughout my Best Buy shift, huddled underneath the circular counter I was supposedly being paid to man. Thankfully, my co-worker, another Harry Potter fan (who consistently referred to Snape as “Snap,” which amuses me to this day), covered for me, badgering customers into extended warranties and extra memory cards all by herself, and alerting me to the presence of approaching supervisors. Thankfully, the Best Buy location I worked at was absolutely massive and hugely overstaffed, so it was easy to disappear for 400 pages or so and finish the book before quitting time.
Steve Heisler
When I was a junior in high school, it was announced at my local movie theater that tickets for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace would go on sale the Friday before the movie came out, at noon. My friends were disappointed, because we had school. But not me. I was talking Calculus BC, an AP class that provided me with a study day—a free day away from school—to prepare for the exam that following Monday. So rather than hitting the books, I waited in line to buy 10 tickets, hanging with other superfans who were inevitably disappointed one week and two and a half hours later. Thankfully, I still did well on the exam in spite of wasting my day on this less-than-noble pursuit, because I think I would have never forgiven myself had I gotten low marks just for the sake of Jar-Jar Binks.
Matt Wild
Back at my old gig sorting mail for a semi-prestigious Milwaukee law firm, I used my last remaining day of paid vacation to see Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull. That I was blowing these precious eight hours in mid-May was bad enough—that I had gleefully plotted out this sad, solo excursion months in advance was even worse. Then there was the movie itself, which dropped me somewhere in the middle of the Star Wars: The Phantom Menace/Star Trek: Nemesis continuum of geek-cinema disappointment. I haven’t seen the film since that fateful day in 2008, and my only memories of it are courtesy of that South Park episode where George Lucas and Steven Spielberg have their way with the once-intrepid Dr. Jones. Oh, and I remember that part where Shia LaBeouf is Tarzan or whatever. Ugh.
Nathan Rabin
I write about this in my memoir, The Big Rewind, but when I was 11 years old, I played hooky from school, purloined some coins from the laundry room of my apartment building, and went to Chicago’s Lincoln Village theater to see Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. It was a defining moment in my life. I had sunk into a deep, seemingly bottomless depression at the time. The world seemed unfathomably cruel and merciless, but for 90 minutes or so, all my problems, self-loathing, and angst dissipated as I escaped into a gloriously absurd, life-affirmingly silly fantasy world where two lunkheads controlled the fate of the planet. It was then and there that I decided that I would devote my life to film in some form. Strangely, I found my path and my future profession by dodging responsibilities and eschewing school rather than following the rules or being responsible. The lesson? Ditch school, young people, and you just might stumble upon your destinies.
Jason Heller
There’s something liberating about growing up around convicted criminals. Visiting your uncle in prison or seeing your mom dragged screaming through your house during a police raid is apt to unshackle any tidy childhood notions of right and wrong. That’s probably the most pathetic justification for embarking on a life of adolescent larceny—but as excuses go, that’s all I got. I had just entered 7th grade when I discovered how easy it was to ditch school and head to Safeway to stuff comics down my pants. This was the ’80s, in the day of newsstand spinner-racks: trees full of X-Men and Teen Titans, just ripe for the picking. From there, everything from D&D modules to Transformers became fair game. It was partly habitual, but my family was also dirt fucking poor, and I was still too young to work. Ditching school and going on “shopping sprees” became a way to feel autonomous and empowered (and, yes, a little less poor, as sad and stupid as that sounds). When I got into high school, though, music became my primary passion—and my primary target. But after many dozens of successful heists, I got busted while stealing a cassette at the mall. Cops were called, charges were pressed, and justice was served. I was 16. At that point, I decided to give up my life of petty crime. Not that it helped my grades; I was so used to ditching, I started failing classes, and I wound up dropping out. But I did immediately find a job—at a comic-book warehouse. Within five years, I was working at comic shops and record stores. One of my favorite parts of the gig? Nabbing shoplifters. Shifty little shits.
Phillip Dyess-Nugent
I grew up in a remote part of Mississippi where there was nothing to do and no place to go, plus it was hot as a bastard in the summer, which is my excuse for having spent 96 percent of my summer vacations in front of the TV. My big reward for this came in 1980, when I became addicted to David Letterman’s NBC morning show, a program that established that Letterman needed to have his own show, but also that the morning shift was not the place for it. (Strong distinctions between what felt right at 9 in the morning vs. what felt right at midnight were lost to me at a time in my life when I never needed to sleep so long as I had steady access to M&Ms and Dr. Pepper.) It might have been the first time in my life I felt I’d personally discovered something that had a strong critical reputation but no commercial support at all, and I felt so bad when school started again and I couldn’t watch it anymore that I felt duty-bound to play hooky on the Friday in October when the last episode aired. My experiment in misplaced priorities might have gone undetected if that hadn’t been the day they were taking school pictures, and there was hell to pay when my mom discovered she’d paid for a yearbook that had a blank space next to my name. Of course, it’s the only school yearbook I kind of wish I still owned.
Noel Murray
I didn’t have a car in high school, so whenever I wanted to leave school early to go to a movie (which I did more than once, most memorably to see Raising Arizona) or to go to a record store, I had to coerce and sometimes even trick my friends into driving me. The absolute worst case happened in my senior year, when I was in a drama class that collaborated with two other Nashville-area high schools to stage the complete Oedipus trilogy. My school was assigned Antigone, which meant we arrived early for the performance, but then had a couple of hours to kill before we took the stage. I convinced some of my fellow actors that we had enough time to grab dinner at a nearby mall; I waxed rhapsodic about Chick-Fil-A, and got them all excited about zipping to the food court and back. But I actually didn’t care about food. Earlier that week, I’d heard side one of Dinosaur Jr.’s You’re Living All Over Me on the college radio station, and I had to have that album, whatever it took. As soon as we got to the mall, I excused myself and went to the record store. I missed dinner altogether, and when my friends realized I’d used them—and risked us missing our opening curtain to boot—they were pissed. But damn, that record was totally worth it.
Keith Phipps
I’m Mr. Responsible, so I don’t have any comparable stories. In fact, looking back, I wish I did have some comparable stories. All I’ve got is a night spent with a college pal my senior year when we were both supposed to be writing 30-page thesis papers (he on Yeats, me on Joyce) and instead sat down to watch Octopussy, which he’d recently acquired on VHS. But just the opening scene and the credits, because those were the best parts. Two and a half hours and one scene with Roger Moore’s James Bond dressing up in clown makeup later, we realized we’d watched the whole thing. I remember little about that paper. But I still fondly remember watching Octopussy.
