Wizards and muggles alike were welcome to play Quidditch, mix potions and test their knowledge of Harry Potter trivia during Beverly and Morgan Park’s Wizarding Weekend.
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Anita Snow said she and her 9-year-old daughter wanted to do as much as they possibly could.
“She’s a huge Harry Potter fan. She’s all into it,” Snow said about her daughter Colette, who wore a dark gown and necktie, the standard Hogwarts Academy uniform, to a potion-making class Saturday at the Givins Beverly Castle.
Colette dressed as Potter’s friend, Hermione Granger, for Halloween two years ago, had a Harry Potter-themed birthday party in February and makes her own potions at home, her mother said.
Madelyn Golebiewski, who grew up in Beverly, volunteered to teach the love potion class.
“I’m from the Harry Potter era,” she said.
“The love potion is the most powerful because think of what you would do for the people you love. You would do a lot,” Golebiewski told the children seated at tables in front of her.
They added ingredients, such as hyacinth petals, toad juice and moon dust “fallen from asteroids and collected very carefully under a full moon,” as Golebiewski described.
Melanie Graff said her sons Patrick, 7, and Conor, 5, are really into potions, making them at home using whatever they can, including soap, shampoo, bath bombs and baking soda.
“I’m the big Harry Potter fan,” Graff said, and introduced her boys to the tales of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and its students, created by author J.K. Rowling.
“They watched up to the fourth movie and then they get a little scarier after that,” Graff said.
Her son Patrick exclaimed, “I’m so excited to see Hogwarts,” when they arrived at Givins Castle, mistaking the turreted building at 103rd Street and Seeley Avenue for the mysterious and looming wizards’ school from the book.
Adair Small celebrated her 77th birthday at the Wizarding Weekend with her family.
“She’s the number one fan,” said her daughter, who with her parents and her 8-year-old daughter, Lily, watched a Quidditch match outside Morgan Park Academy.
Rowling invented the game Quidditch, played in the sky with the opponents riding flying broomsticks and trying to score by throwing a ball through a hoop.
Small aid 77 is not a bad age.
“I’m happy to be on my feet, if not on a broomstick,” she said.
Small said Hermione is her favorite character, “because she is a girl and she spent a lot of time in the library which was me when I was young.”
Her husband, Ken Small, a retired professor, favors Professor Dumbledore, Hogwarts headmaster, because he is “a role model for character and integrity.”
Eight-year-old Mateo Rivera arrived at the Quidditch field on the south side of Morgan Park Academy in Harry Potter attire.
He was curious what the players would use for a snitch, the small winged golden ball that flies around in the Harry Potter game.
Turns out a person wearing yellow shorts, with a tennis ball dangling in front, serves as the snitch, said Annie Petrelli, who plays on a collegiate level Quidditch team called Lumos.
It’s a coed full contact sport, also called quadball, played with dodgeballs and volleyballs and each team having six players on the field at a time, said Luca Egleston and Ella Estopare, two other Lumos members who were teaching newcomers the game.
Morgan Park Academy, built in the late 19th century, also opened its Alumni Hall to the weekend events. Banners from the different Hogwarts dormitories had been hung on the library’s wood paneled walls.
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While children could take a Harry Potter quiz online using computers in the academy’s library, the room had an Old World feel, with a large stone fireplace and a split staircase leading to the second floor.
Grace Kuikman, who helped organize the Wizarding weekend, said when she saw the library it said Hogwarts to her, “and me without my Floo powder,” referring to what wizards used to transport themselves from fireplace hearths.
The weekend activities, organized by the Beverly Area Planning Association, ran from Thursday through Sunday afternoon and included a Harry Potter movie marathon at the Beverly Arts Center, a wizarding trivia game at the Cork & Kerry Tavern Friday, readings at libraries and bookstores, specially themed menus at area restaurants, magicians and a visit to the goblins’ vault in Beverly Bank & Trust Co.
Kimberly Fornek is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.