Interviews
Our Jeopardy experiences
This page includes three items.
Laura's Ottawa City article on
her appearance on Jeopardy in 2004; my article on my
audition back in 1996; and a
ridiculously long item on how both Laura and I qualified in
2003 and on my advice and impressions,
which I hope will be useful for those auditioning for the
show, and those chosen to go on! I also have some links to
some interesting Jeopardy sites.
Jeopardy is a trademark of Sony Pictures Studios and, obviously,
no attempt is made here to infringe on that trademark or to
make commercial gain from the use of that trademark.
Laura's
article on her appearance
This is
Laura's original draft. The actual article appearing in
Ottawa City was much shorter.
Why on earth would anyone want to go on a quiz
show?
I mean, really. It’s like taking a pop quiz in
front of millions of people, all of whom are sitting at home
yelling, “You idiot! Everyone knows that the capital of Chad
is N’Djamena!”
Fortunately, I won’t be able to hear the vast
majority of those people when my 22-minute brush with fame
airs on the May 17th episode of Jeopardy!
Back in February, I found myself at the Sony Pictures
Studios in Culver City, California, and it’s all my husband
Paul’s fault. You see, auditioning for Jeopardy!
(yes, the annoying exclamation point is part of the name)
was his idea. We both tried out while on vacation in L.A.
last June and both qualified. Then we were added to a list
of possible contestants and came home to wait for The Call.
The great irony is that Paul should have been called instead
of me. He’s the Trivia King, after all, and knows far more
than I do about the arcane workings of the solar system and
American sports leagues. I’m more of a very minor Trivia
Princess. But the telephone bell tolled for me, so back to
L.A. we went.
The day of the taping, I took a shuttle to the studio with
all the other contestants and tried to forget that Paul, on
learning of its existence, had instantly dubbed it The Nerd
Bus. Off we drove along sunny, palm-fringed streets, each
dreaming of the ways we would spend the riches we soon hoped
to win. Well, at least I was.
The Sony property was once the MGM studio, so you enter
through a big gate just like the ones in old movies. In
fact, one of the biggest kicks of the day for me, since I’m
a huge Jimmy Stewart fan, was the fact that the
shuttle bus let us out in the Jimmy Stewart Memorial Parking
Lot. (But really, the guy is one of the biggest stars
Hollywood ever produced, and all he gets is a parking
lot?)
We were deposited on a set of park benches
inside a parking garage to wait for our handler. The
Jeopardy! folks, like all game show people, are
fanatical about security. Ever since the quiz show scandals
of the 1950s, they’ve been terrified that contestants will
try to fix a game. From the moment we entered the lot until
our moment in the spotlight was done, we would be shepherded
like strangers visiting CSIS, all in an effort to keep us
from accidentally encountering and interrogating one of the
show’s writers.
Finally, a Sony shuttle came to collect us and
dropped us off in front of a completely unremarkable looking
building. Up a set of metal stairs we trooped, each of us
carrying luggage with two complete changes of clothes in it.
Five shows are taped every day, and in the happy event you
win, you have to be able to change clothes quickly.
Unfortunately, the luggage made me feel like a
contestant on a reality show, about to be voted off the
island or fired by Donald Trump.
We spent most of the pre-show time filling out
forms. Many, many forms, at least one of them longer than
the average mortgage contract. Releases, permissions,
indemnity clauses. If I ever have a first-born child, I may
have to name it Alex, for all I know.
As I was stuffing my face with a free jelly
doughnut, I heard Maggie, the ebullient contestant
coordinator, call my name. Diverted by carbs, I didn’t know
what was up.
“You’re on,” she informed me.
“First?” Apparently, I was off to my
appointment with destiny without a preview. Yikes.
The coordinators herded us out to the set, which
is blue and glassy and surprisingly small. I caught sight of
Paul in the audience and waved like a lunatic—almost exactly
as I’d waved at my mother going up the aisle to my First
Communion many years ago. I got almost the same tolerant
stare, which I interpreted as, “Hey, this kid’s just way too
uncool.” Only later did I learn that the audience members
had been instructed not to make any kind of eye contact with
“their” contestant, in case they’d tackled and tortured a
writer out in the hall and were thinking of transmitting the
questions and answers to the stage via mental telepathy.
We each got a chance to practice ringing in with the
buzzers. Then, before I really realized what was happening,
I was up on a box (the Jeopardy! people like all the
contestants to be roughly the same height—it makes things
simple for the camera operators), in between two tall, nice
men. That familiar theme music started playing, the camera
swooped over the audience, and it was show time.
Alex Trebek emerged from backstage and moved to the podium.
All of a sudden, questions were coming at us thick and fast.
To my delight, I managed not to make too much of a fool of
myself during the “chat with the terrified contestants”
segment of the show. Granted, I’ve been dining out on my
story (the fact that my birth announcement appeared in my
hometown newspaper’s classified section under the heading
“Livestock for Sale”) since I was a child, so at least I
didn’t trip over my tongue in telling it.
Before you ask, I can’t tell you whether I won or lost. The
first thing I learned about being on a game show is that
game shows involve a lot of paperwork. Contracts longer than
my mortgage agreement. Waivers and permission forms and all
sorts of hoo-hah. And in big bold letters, it tells me—and
I’m paraphrasing a bit here—that if I reveal the outcome of
the show before the airdate, the Jeopardy! gods will
fire their Hollywood lightning bolts at me and strike me
dead.
So please don’t ask. Let me just put it this way: I’m not
looking for a tax shelter in the Caymans just yet.
But I can tell you that when it was all
over, Paul and I simply walked across the lot and out to the
sidewalk to get a cab. There wasn’t even a Nerd Bus to
shuttle us back to the hotel.
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