Happy Star Wars Day

And my birthday🎂

May 25, 2025

My birthday has never been a big deal for me. As they say in golf, “KISS,” (keep it simple, silly), golf and champagne is my birthday tradition.🏌🏼‍♀️🥂🍾

Otherwise, I’d probably forget it all together. One time, around 1990, I was working at my Paris film production office when a fax was placed on my desk. The date on the fax looked familiar, May 25th. It was that surreal feeling, until I realized it was my birthday, which had completely slipped my mind.

The date May 25th seems to crop up often in history, for good or for bad.

One reason I block out my birthday might be psychological. I’ll never forget the day I was walking home from high school, heading north on Emroy, my tree-lined street in Elmhurst, Illinois, a suburb about 20 miles west of Chicago, when I saw a huge, dark plume of smoke in the distance.

Our home was in the flight path of O’Hare Airport, so we were accostomed to the sound of airplanes overhead. It turns out, the smoke was from the American Airlines Flight 191, a McDonnell-Douglas DC-10 aircraft, that had crashed shortly after takeoff from Chicago O’Hare. All 271 persons aboard were killed, along with two more souls on the ground. It remains to this day the deadliest aircraft accident on U.S. soil.

It wasn’t until decades later that I realized that crash happened on my birthday, May 25, 1979. I don’t remember my birthday or much else that day.

Here’s a mathmatical fun fact shared by the ever brilliant

TCinLA

yesterday.

Also, not to take away from the elegant May the 4th Star Wars Day, but the groundbreaking movie, Star Wars, was released May 25th.

May 25th is Star Wars Day.

In honor of the 30th anniversary release date of Star Wars on May 25, 1977, the Los Angeles City Council declared May 25, 2007, as Star Wars Day. A separate initiative for observing Geek Pride Day on May 25 is based on the Star Wars connection along with ties to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Towel Day) and Discworld. Solo: A Star Wars Story was also released on May 25, 2018, 41 years after the original Star Wars.

So, yes, I’m a geek by birth right.

Finally, it wasn’t May 25th, but another groundbreaking movie, Smokey and the Bandit, was released just two days after Star Wars, on May 27, 1977. Most people don’t realize that movie matched the box office smash sales of Star Wars.

But the funniest coincidence is that I’m now married to the writer/producer of Smokey and the Bandit, Robert Levy. Below are photos of me around 1977-78 at 16-17 years old standing near my high school boyfriend’s Trans Am, my hubby and me, and a framed original poster hanging on a wall in our home. Coincidence?