Quincy Herald-Whig | Illinois & Missouri News, SportsPoletti: 'Star Wars' is common bond for nerdy father-daughter pair

FOR MOST OF my life, I've stood at the center of a sort of Venn diagram, the intersection of three circles best labeled "nerd," "tomboy" and "girly-girl."

I either blame or credit my father for the first two, depending on my comfort level with them at any given time. He is enigmatic in his own interests, but one thing he'll never deny is his love of science fiction. He's spent most of three decades trying to instill it in me.

He's succeeded in only one facet of that journey. I am a lifelong "Star Wars" geek.

No, I never hit up any sci-fi conventions, nor do I care for much else in the genre. But I got in heated debates with sixth-grade guy friends over the merits of the Rebel Alliance versus the Galactic Empire. I went trick-or-treating as Princess Leia one Halloween. I read a few of the novels, and at the risk of being tarred and feathered, I will admit I saw "The Phantom Menace" five times. (Stop looking at me like that.)

Even in my teen and college years, when I thought I was terribly hot stuff, I still ended up seeing the other two prequels with friends, and I still laughed when a friend gave me a set of "Star Wars" Pez dispensers. Later, in the extra-special nerd heaven that was grad school, a friend and I would quote the movies at random. I still snicker at "Star Wars" references in pop culture.

Still, Dad is the common denominator in most of my "Star Wars" memories. It's because of him that I got entangled in this nerdiest of pursuits, after all.

It's because of Dad that one of the first things I can remember reading -- at age 3, to my parents' great surprise -- is that scrolling yellow text at the beginning of each movie, which we owned on already-weathered VHS tapes.

It was Dad who took my sister and me to see the special editions of the original trilogy -- the ones at which purists sniff, "Han shot first" -- so that we could experience the movies as he had before we were born, even though we already knew all of the movies' secrets from him.

It was Dad who flipped on the two-day marathon on Spike TV last Christmas Eve, providing a backdrop, a tether back to him when my sister and I brought our respective significant others home.

It was Dad who watched three of the movies with me in one day in grad school, when I spent a week's break flat on my back with the flu.

It was Dad who assured me that being a nerd was no sin when, in fifth grade, glorying in my nerdiness, I announced that I thought I was cool and the resident mean girl sharply told me otherwise.

By now, my sister and I -- whose shared love of "Star Wars" is a little different, a little more playful and ironic -- know to nurture Dad's geekiness. I've bought him Darth Vader and Yoda Christmas stockings. She took him to see the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra perform the original movie's score.

We do it because his love of "Star Wars" nurtured something greater in us than our own love of it.

It makes us unique among women, particularly the sorority girls with whom I spent my early 20s, but it also gives us something eternally in common with Dad.

The older I get, the more opinionated I become and the closer I get to the girly-girl my mom strove to raise, the less I have in common with Dad beyond our shared DNA. The bond between us remains strong, though, because of this geeky thing we share.

"Star Wars" may be about a parent-child relationship more complicated than ours -- Darth Vader my father isn't -- but to me, it is still about ours. And so, as we celebrate fathers this month, I'll be celebrating mine by celebrating the nerd he made me.

-- mpoletti@whig.com/221-3385