We’ve all done it: we’ve been happily jamming to a tune at high volume in our car, windows down, when we roll up to a red light and find a bunch of people staring at us.  Apparently, not everyone is convinced Barry Manilow’s Can’t Smile Without You is a rip-roaring song worthy of blast-level sound.  To some, this is an embrassing reveal of our souls, to others–espeically those of us in  high school way back in the mid-’90s–it was a great opportunity to pull up next to a hapless red light victim and start blasting away the first few lyrics of this song:

Ah… Lion.  You were like Dokken wannabes.  And those in the cars next to us (for yes, I had cohorts) were okay with the heavy metal-ish chords which started off the song.  But when Lion sang “Transformers!” it ain’t nothing but a baleful gaze they sent our way.

Anyway, speaking of  youth, there are some world events where the announcements of such blaze a marker in your mind so deep and so permanent that you know exactly where you were when you heard, say, about JFK’s death (not me; I wasn’t even daddy’s little squirt or mama’s little egg bunch at the time), or the Challenger explosion (walking the hall at my elementary school when someone shouted that news bit out–I thought they were joking).  Perhaps the tragedy that loomed the largest in my pre-pubescent days wasn’t a political event, or a space shuttle kaboom.

No, it was the announcement of this scene:

Poor, poor Optimus Prime.  Hasbro, in a cynical attempt to sell new toys, actually created an entire movie (Orson Welle’s last flick, by the way) to showcase the death of its old line.  Numerous familiar robots were slain to make room for the newer, sleeker generation, and it caught all of us Transformer fans by surprise.  Expecting a rocking movie of bent and burnt metal, we were forced to face the reality that, yes, even Optimus Prime is expendable when corporate greed comes a-knockin’.

So, where was I?  In my classroom, a victim of a loud-mouth spoiler who rushed in to tell everyone Prime had passed.  I didn’t want to see the movie–I had to see the movie–I hated the movie–I own the movie.

Now, where were you when Optimus Prime died?