Muggles, Wizards and Witches

No offense to the other locations at which Harry Potter celebrations were held on Friday evening, but it was clear that if you wanted to get Boston's ultimate HP countdown experience, you had to whisk yourself off to Harvard Square. With a cluster of bookshops steps away from each other and a courtyard concert headlined by Draco & the Malfoys and Harry & the Potters, the Square served for a night as the local center of the wizarding world.

(We would have told you all about this over the course of the weekend, but we were busy reading, obviously.)

The verdict? Waiting to buy a book has never felt so enjoyable. Whether it was sampling multiple brews of Butterbeer (Tealuxe was selling, Curious George Goes to Wordsworth was giving it away), looking over the costumes and realizing that Slytherin girls are apparently easy, or eavesdropping on theories, there was more than enough to do between the hours of 7 and 11. Once the countdown was less than an hour, most that hadn't been waiting in line all day joined the ranks and counted down the minutes, chugged Red Bull and watched red moving lights roam the Square.

It seemed that most shared a celebratory spirit (the large "Stop Voldemort" sticker on the lamppost nearest Curious George's front door was a nice touch), one person caught Bostonist's eye and would have been hexed, had we any magical powers of our own. Early into the evening, we saw a young man sitting in the courtyard, sporting a homemade HP shirt - on the back of which was what had been rumored to be the last sentence of the book. We're not going to tell you whether it was or wasn't - we don't want anyone who saw him but hasn't finished the book to know one way or the other - but that was lame. Beyond lame. Off to Azkaban, you jerk.

Special HP props, though, to the trio that brilliantly donned the Malfoy Family personas (and stood for hours in archways to pose for photographs). Additional moxie points go to the small group standing near the Harvard T stop around 12:30 a.m., asking people to reveal to them specifically numbered words in the text. Bostonist passed early - we revealed that the eighth word of the book is "a" - and we don't know how long they kept up with the game. But they were chanting the ever-lengthening sentence aloud with a sense of spunk that mirrored what we've spent years reading about in these books.

Photos by Victoria Welch