What the Redhead Was Doing

Up too early, nothing useful on, and then there it was: The Wizard. I hadn’t thought about that film in years. Three kids driving to California for a video game tournament, the whole thing essentially a feature-length Nintendo commercial, and I had absorbed it as scripture when I was young. The premise—that being genuinely skilled at video games was worth traveling across the country to prove—felt completely reasonable to me at the time. Part of me still thinks it is.

Then I finally looked up the red-haired girl from the credits. Jenny Lewis. Lead singer of Rilo Kiley, whose records I’ve owned for years. I’d never connected those two facts. Some knowledge assembles itself slowly—you hold the pieces separately for a decade before something flips and they click into place at 7am in front of a television you didn’t even mean to turn on.