Think you’re the biggest ‘Harry Potter’ fan in Beaufort County? We’ll see about that

Minutes before the 12:01 a.m. release of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” on Saturday night, Barnes & Noble employee Clint Moore and I talked about his own Potter fandom.

“I used to be on the other side of this,” he said of the people lined up at the Hilton Head Island bookstore to buy the newest book in the “Harry Potter” series. “... I didn’t do the cosplay though.”

“Wait,” I said. “This is cosplay?”

“Well, yeah.”

I had heard of “cosplay,” of course, but had never actually seen that level of fan obsession in person. I once went to a book expo in New York City, and there were signs everywhere telling attendees not to touch or in any way “sexually harass the cosplayers.”

I had so many questions.

But all I saw that day was a single Random House employee dressed like Garfield the cat. If he was getting sexually harassed then I don’t want to live on Earth anymore.

“They’re dressed up like characters and talking about the books,” Moore said of the wizarding crowd Saturday night. “So yeah, that’s cosplay.”

It turns out it’s not a subversive or perverse activity. People putting on costumes and talking quite seriously about fictional worlds is “cosplay.”

Suddenly, the last four hours of my four-hour “Harry Potter” release party experience made a lot more sense.

About 75 people had spent the night making wands, searching for golden snitches, earning points for their Hogwarts houses and counting down the minutes until they could read the two-part play set 19 years after “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the last book in the series.

Among the snippets of conversation I heard were “Listen to what I’m saying about Draco Malfoy!” and “At Ilvermorny, I’m a Wampus.”

Many at the party were in robes and Hogwarts uniforms, some wore themed T-shirts, two even had official Harry Potter brooms that they parked in the arms of their very loving grandmother who happily carried them around with her like a house elf.

Throughout the night, I assumed everyone I met had better recall than I did about “Harry Potter,” and I felt slightly ashamed by that.

I knew the fans were enthusiastic, but now that I knew this was cosplay I could see that they were Officially Enthusiastic.

My first clue Saturday night should have been when I chatted with Kelly Singleton Headd and her husband, Eric Crossman, of Hilton Head.

They had brought their 3-month-old baby, Emma, to the party. She had a tiny little lightning bolt drawn in eyeliner on her forehead.

“He was like ‘Did you put makeup on my baby?’ ” Singleton Headd laughed.

Then they joked about who the bigger Potter fan is.

“Um, who dressed up for the last movie?” Singleton Headd said.

“Who took you to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter?” Crossman said.

“Who bought you butterbeer?”

“Who bought you a wand?”

They planned to buy two copies of the new book so no one would have to cast any My-turn-iamus spells later.

In 2007, Mandy Rosenberry of Hilton Head and her husband, Chris, only bought one copy of “Deathly Hallows” the night it was released.

It was a mistake.

“I used a flashlight on the drive home (from Barnes & Noble) and read out loud to (him),” she said.

That night, her husband kept waking up to her sobbing over the book.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. Then he remembered. “Don’t tell me! Don’t ruin it for me!”

On Saturday night, Rosenberry sat and knitted a gold and gray scarf while her kids played “Harry Potter” trivia. I ran into her AFTER the controversy over whether Barnes & Noble was asking questions pulled from the movies or from the book series.

Rosenberry explained the scarf to me in terms that immediately told me that, like in “Harry Potter” trivia, I was in over my head.

Newt Scamander color palette?

“So like vintage Hufflepuff colors?,” I said, guessing at what all the words meant.

“Exactly.”

Across the room, a board was set up where everyone could write what “Harry Potter” has meant to them.

Mostly people wrote “Harry Potter is life!” One kid who misunderstood the assignment and wrote “Hampy Petter.”

On a full third of the board, someone had scrawled, “Slytherin is Everything!”

It was such a Slytherin move.

A Gryffindor, I assume, attempted to put the Slytherin in his or her place by writing “No way!” above it.

And a Slytherin, or a friend of Slytherins, further amended THAT to say “No way yourself!”

Other than that, everyone at Hogwarts got along Saturday night, even though three-quarters of the crowd was annoyed that Ravenclaw kept winning points toward the House Cup.

The last event of the night was a Pictionary-like game in which representatives from each house had to draw a clue for the rest of the team to guess.

The first kid up, a teenage Ravenclaw wearing a Quidditch shirt, saw his clue and turned to the game show host, Barnes & Noble employee Kamden Brown, for help.

“Um …. But ….”

Brown told him it was OK.

Instead of drawing, the teen just pointed to the blank piece of paper.

“INVISIBILITY CLOAK!” his team shouted immediately. Without thought. As if they were born waiting for this moment to happen one day.

Or maybe it was magic.

At 11:32 p.m. everyone lined up in between the shelves of books and waited it out. The only customers at the front of the store were the six VIP Potter fans.

VIP because they were Barnes & Noble Mastercard holders.

Every single one of them had opened their accounts that night just for this privilege.

Friends Allison Stark and Izzy Loftin, both of Bluffton, were at the very front of the line and in full Hogwarts uniform. Stark is a Hufflepuff. Loftin, a Ravenclaw.

Both had to be awake at 6 a.m. Sunday, yet they planned to stay up all night to read the book.

They were so happy that their words tumbled out of them in short bursts.

“Um, I don’t care,” Stark said about how late it was. “I don’t care.”

After she paid for her book, she walked toward the door beaming. A young girl in a Gryffindor robe stopped her.

“Can I see it?”

Stark pulled the book out of the bag and opened it.

“Whoa,” the girl said.

This story was originally published July 31, 2016 at 7:34 PM with the headline "Think you’re the biggest ‘Harry Potter’ fan in Beaufort County? We’ll see about that."