by Alison Janssen I'm a trusting person, and I tend toward the optimistic side of the spectrum. Sometimes incredibly awesome and unlikely things happen to me, like the time I met Matthew Broderick outside a Broadway theater and he recognized me from the audience. Or the time I won a model spaceship by entering a contest from the show Encyclopedia on HBO. Or the time, at age 28, I ran into the boy I loved when I was 12, and he asked me out ... and now we're engaged.
So you'll forgive me if I'm a perfect target for April Fools' pranks.
My senior year of college, I lived in a Town House (considered campus housing, but across the street from campus, and seniors-only) with my best friend and three other students. They were three (mostly) nice guys, and they built a kegerator and we had occasional weekend parties (which of course did not interfere with our studies [which was easy because no theater classes were ever scheduled before 2 in the afternoon]), and we all had a good time.
One weekend in March, after enjoying some freshly kegerated beer, my old roommate Maureen and I got to talking about movie stars, and which ones we thought were cute. As the Lord of the Rings movie had recently come out, and as Maureen is a HUGE LOTR fan, and as we are both in general pretty nerdy, we decided that Elijah Wood was the cutest of the cute. And we decided that the best way of spending our Saturday evening was to craft -- for hours, I think -- a fan letter to him.
We seemed to think that by Googling "Elijah Wood email," we'd be able to find an email address to which we could send our lovingly rendered fan letter. And we did! We found a site that promised to forward fan letters to various stars, without a fee, and so we ambitiously hit Send. Then I think we drank more beer, probably.
Anyway, cut to about a week later, when (gosh, I wish I still had the emails), something WONDERFUL arrived in my Inbox. An email! From Elijah Wood! He got our letter, and was responding! With enthusiasm! And he thought we were nice!
Of course Maureen and I freaked out and got all excited, and wrote back.
For weeks.
Yes, we corresponded with Elijah Wood over email for weeks. Turns out, he was filming his next movie in upstate New York! Not far from where we went to school, really! He was heading down toward Poughkeepsie to meet an old friend! Did we want to maybe grab dinner or something?
Yes, yes. I know. I KNOW! But see above! Crazy things sometimes happen! Why couldn't it be that Elijah Wood was moved by the power of our fan letter to set up a generic hobbit-related Hotmail account and being a correspondence? Is that so much less likely that being hit by lightning or eaten by a wolf?!
Well, thankfully, the three mostly nice, but prank-prone guys I lived with eventually couldn't carry on the charade any longer, and while Maureen and I were squealing and giggling in my room, planning our upcoming dinner with Elijah, they burst in to let us in on their Fake Elijah joke. And it was funny, I'll give them that. Not as funny as the time that same year that they slowly started stealing random items of mine (like my Godfather DVD boxed set), wrapping them, and putting them under the Christmas tree as presents for me, but still funny.
And so you see, I'm going to take a very cautious approach to today. Though I'm sure before the sun sets, I'll be someone's fool again.
