Best Future Father? Elijah Wood

Hands down, Elijah wood is going to be one of the best dads out there. I know this because of a favorite childhood memory I don't share often enough.

It’s about a gameboy. A gameboy, and Elijah Wood. Who, many women my age hope, is a boy with game.

Elijah at a more recent Disney release - Tron: Uprising

Ok, so now he is a man. A very attractive, successful, talented man. One we’ve been following since childhood. So, travel with me back to a time when we was indeed a boy, and he let me use his gameboy. It was late summer/early fall 1989. The gameboy had just been released on the market and though I would eventually get mine in the form of a chanukah gift that winter, I’d only seen commercials for this $99 pocket computer. But in those first few months between knowing about a gameboy and being able to play my own, it was a cultural status symbol and we were all obsessed with it.

I hadn’t yet played one as school was called into session that fall. In fact, I wasn’t in school, I was on set filming a “Disney educational film.” I don’t talk about that set very often. Realistically, there isn’t a lot that’s exciting about actually teaching people not to run with scissors when you don’t work in a classroom. But the set was filled with lots of cool kids, including a new friend playing a real-life pinocchio. His name was Elijah and our mothers sat together, bonding over their shared experiences. Being a stage-mom has a lot to bond over.

While they were swapping stories about their commutes to LA (Elijah’s was farther than my drives from Orange County. He’d started his career while still in Iowa), they connected, and I overheard that Elijah’s siblings had biblical names, like his.

The thing that stood out most to me, though, was when all the kids had down time in the trailer. There was a line of people who’d called dibs to play Mario Brothers on Elijah’s gameboy (do you remember a time when those graphics were impressive?). When it came to my turn, my very first turn playing on a gameboy ever, the other boys all said “why bother letting her play? She’s just going to lose anyway.”

Elijah defended the decision to let me have my turn. He may have literally, word for word, been repeating whatever his parent’s policies were on sharing toys, but there he went. It went something like: “Nope, it’s her turn, she waited in line and gets a turn too.”  I really appreciated the opportunity, in that moment, to play a video game like the line of boys before and after me. I’m far from a “gamer” but it let me know what having a brother would be like (4 years prior to becoming a sister) and, more importantly, what being a gentleman looks like.

So, to whoever gets to (eventually) have Elijah parent their kids, you’re lucky. This guy knows what it means to treat women well, to share, and to create space for people to fail. Because obviously, I killed off Mario in record time that day.

PS don’t run with scissors. And no, I don’t have a copy of the film. It’s in the "vault" somewhere and my friend who works at Disney hasn’t been able to locate it. Maybe Elijah ended up with a copy for his reel.