For the last two years, each January I take the Jeopardy on-line quiz. If you score high enough on the quiz, you may get selected to advance to the next phase of the qualifying process. Then again, you may not. The restrictions stated in the disclaimer on the Jeopardy website are so numerous they might as well pick future contestants randomly from various college alumni associations. Undaunted, I ignored the long odds, and tested last evening for the third consecutive year.
You may say to yourself, “It really takes a pompous ass to think they’re such a wellspring of knowledge that they have any shot of appearing on the show.” Those people obviously haven’t heard of American Idol. The motley collection of off key, tone deaf crooner wanna-bes, make even the most tin eared soul cringe. Personally, I’ve never seen a single episode. However, I’ve seen enough of the trailers to get a feel for the talent level of the thousands who audition and get the ol’ “Thanks for coming” after two or three notes. My presumptions for trying out for Jeopardy have a precedent. Four and half years ago, I made an appearance on Who Wants to be a Millionaire.
For many years I harbored a longing to appear on a game show. Jeopardy was always the one I thought I always had a shot at. When I was middle school age, unbeknownst to me at the time, I think my mother was trying to groom me to be a contestant. After dinner, and well into her cups, my mother would pull out The World Almanac and quiz me. She had seen how I could recall any statistic off the backs of baseball cards. Little did she know, any kid with an intense interest in baseball could duplicate this minor feat. My mother seemed to interpret this skill to mean I was blessed with some sort of low grade photographic memory. I humored her, like I frequently did when she was shithoused, and let her fire questions at me covering a wide array of topics. Occasionally I’d get one or two right by sheer luck. When I got a question wrong, my mother always seemed disappointed. She obviously hadn’t paid attention to the letters that filled the boxes of the report cards I brought home. Maybe she thought my grades were written in a secret cipher, leaving it up to her to decode as she saw fit.
By repetition alone, I started to retain some of the useless bullshit she pounded into my head. It served no real purpose except to settle bar bets and annoy others at cocktail parties. I never dreamt this plethora of brain cotton-candy would one day serve me well.
Later in life, even with my mother’s occasional nagging encouragement, I never had the balls to inquire as to how one got on a game show. My first real interest in attempting to qualify came, in a drunken stupor, right after Who Wants to be a Millionaire made its television debut. Regis Philbin was the host then. The program aired in the evening once a week. The show concluded with an announcement by some Don Pardo clone about becoming a contestant.
The process was simple, and if you passed, your name got put in the contestant pool. If your name was drawn, ABC would fly you to New York, put you up in a swanky hotel, and you’d get a chance to join nine others on stage to play “Fast Finger” for a chance to sit in the hot seat. All you had to do was play a phone version of “Fast Finger.” If you got all the questions right in the allotted time, you were in.
I made one attempt one evening while feeling quite a bit more lucid than usual. I pressed the wrong corresponding button on my touch tone phone. A pleasant recorded voice said “Thanks for playing. Try again tomorrow!” I think I said “Fuck you shitstain” to the pre-recorded phone voice. I vowed never to try to be a contestant on a game show ever again. What transpired was not of my doing.
In August of 2005, a couple purchased the townhome next to ours for the purpose of renting it to the husband’s elderly father. They were in the midst of refurbishing the place when the wife, after returning to their home in the next town, noticed an announcement in the paper declaring tryouts for Who Wants to be a Millionaire. The announcement was in The Sun-Sentinel, my wife and I get The Miami Herald; it contained no such notice, not that I’d be looking for one anyway. My days of game show aspirations (now that’s something to aspire to huh!?) were long behind me. The woman, Joanne, took time out of her life to cut out the article and make a special trip to our home to drop it off. She must have been acquainted with my mother in another life. I was out that evening. My wife Helen clued me in when I got home.
The tryout was to take place the next morning at nine o’clock at the Monarch Dodge dealership in Ft. Lauderdale. I was now in the master’s program in history at Florida Atlantic University. This required quite a bit of my time. The following day I had a paper due in The Historiography of the Modern Middle East. The period covered during the course was about two-thousand years. Trying out for a game show was not high on my priority list. I wanted to go sit in line with a bunch of self-professed know-it-alls about as much as I wanted to have a third eyeball implanted in my forehead; though like the worthless knowledge, that too may one day prove useful.
Helen and I discussed the prospect at length. I decided that since Joanne had gone out of her way to drop off the notice, I could be kind enough to go to this pseudo-intellectual clusterfuck. When I arrived at eight forty-five, there were already four-hundred people of all shapes and sizes waiting in line. I was wise enough to bring a stadium chair. I also brought my homework, and a Gatorade, which was a good thing since the temperature was already near ninety.
After taking my place in line, I was given a “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” refrigerator magnet with a number on the back. I was also given a questionnaire to fill out. Upon first inspection, the questions seemed rather inane. As I began to answer them, the questions struck me as ludicrous. It seemed as though the questions were worded to bait you into giving an asinine answer. I suspect to determine if you were “interesting” enough for the show, if you were lucky enough to get that far.
Twenty thousand people a year audition to become contestants. Only two hundred ever get to sit across from Meredith Viera, the show’s current host. My answers were not going to reach out and “grab” those involved in the filtering process. I guess my heart, as well as my head, wasn’t in it.
We were shuttled onto the showroom floor of dealership (a kind of human “this year’s models”) in groups of two hundred. We were handed two packets containing questions for two separate tests. One was general knowledge, the other movies, in conjunction with a Netflix promotion the show was running. The movie test came first.
We had ten minutes to answer thirty multiple guess questions. We’d be given the high sign when there was five minutes to go. Another warning when one minute remained. I used up most of the ten minutes, and surmised I got three wrong. Percentages indicate that if you guess on three questions, one is going to be right. The other twenty-six I knew the answers to. You know what you know, and you know what you don’t know, is precisely what I said to some mental giant who asked me how I did. It’s not brain surgery you know.
After some bullshit “entertainment,” we took the other test. Within three minutes I had completed my test confident that I knew every single answer. Whatever reservoir of information I did indeed have, I finally was able to tap into it. When the time came for the crew to announce who had passed and would move on to Phase Two, the number on the back of my little magnet was called.
Phase Two consisted of a Polaroid picture and an interview with a member of the show’s production staff. After some light, witty repartee, my interview went like this:
“Wade, by the answers you gave on the questionnaire, you didn’t strike us as a very interesting guy. But in person, you’re extremely interesting (a first for me!). So we’re going to include your name in the contestant pool. If your name is drawn in the next six months we’ll ask you to come to New York to be on the show. Congratulations!”
I said “Thanks.”
Six days later “Nate” called to say my name had been drawn, could I come to New York for a Labor Day shooting. The next day I received a card in the mail congratulating me on making into the contestant pool. I guess I wowed them during the interview part huh? What this meant to me, was I was going to have to cut class for the first time since my return to school. Let’s not forget those priorities!
Helen and I went to NYC, had a blast, won some money, and the rest they say is history; or at least a blog for another day. Will I be so fortunate again, who knows?
The first two times I took the Jeopardy Challenge, I think I got thirty-six of the fifty questions correct in the twelve minutes allotted, this time maybe a couple more. I think you probably need at least forty right to render consideration. If I am so lucky, I get to take another test down in Miami. If I pass that, there’s a mock show against two other qualifiers. If I get through that, I fly to L.A. on my own dime for another mock contest. You win that, you get on the show with that smug bastard Alex Trebek. (Doesn’t he act like he’d get all the answers right if he was playing?) That’s all there is to it!
Let’s not hold our collective breaths okay? My guess is I’ll be taking the test again next January. I’ll write another blog about it.
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