I’m not really nervous. I probably should be. I’m going on a half-hour’s worth of sleep and enough Red Bull to make a rhino twitchy.
“Quiet, please,” the state manager asks. The studio audience, mostly seventh- and eighth-grader on a field trip for this set of tapings, quiets to a soft murmur – still not quiet enough. “Quiet, please,” the stage manager asks again, a bit more forcefully, and the audience finally goes dead silent.
The opening theme, familiar to generations of Americans, is piped into the studio, and the opening credits roll across the 36 television screens that comprise the big board. This is the fourth time I’ve seen them today, but the first from my vantage point.
“This…is…Jeopardy!” Johnny Gilbert begins for the 5,092nd time, as regular as the rising sun. “Let’s meet today’s contestants! An alternative print coordinator from Moscow, Idaho… Dave Meddish…”
…
In 1968, a square-shouldered redhead entered the world and would rapidly exhibit signs of being of rather high intelligence and having a voracious appetite for knowledge. At age six, this child would read volumes of World Book Encyclopedia for fun. He would have read the entire library of his elementary school by the second grade. A natural born speed-reader, he read War and Peace in six hours. Even now, at 38 years of age, he reads at a 45-year-old level.
And he’s very modest, too, although losing all the red hair may have knocked him down a peg or two.
Unfortunately, all this knowledge proved detrimental to yours truly until my teenage years. When you’re a both a brainiac and a little behind the growth curve – curse this Scandinavian ancestry – that tends to get you the Martin Prince treatment. And the knowledge of factoids that the music for the Star-Spangled Banner is based on an old British drinking song… that isn’t something you can put on your college application.
That all changed in the mid-80s with the appearance of two now-cultural icons. The first was Trivial Pursuit, and suddenly, all that worthless knowledge rattling around in my brain was worthwhile, and if there was a game at a party, I was usually one of the first people chosen for a team (quite the change from being the last picked for kickball).
The second was the revival of Jeopardy!, piggybacking on the popularity of Trivial Pursuit. While Trivial Pursuit has faded from the public view, Jeopardy! remains among the most popular syndicated game shows in history.
Not surprisingly, people who would play me at Trivial Pursuit would tell me, “Dude, with all that trivia in your brain, you should get on that Jeopardy! show!”
For the last twenty-odd years that’s been a goal of mine, and when people would tell me that, I’d say “yes, I know,” adding an unspoken postscript: It ain’t like I haven’t been trying.
Twenty-odd years of trying have taught me that Jeopardy!, while considered a game of knowledge and skill, like any other game, there is an element of luck. A ginormous element. You could spend months boning up Biblical figures and get categories like “Famous Atheists.” You might be just a split second slow on the buzzer, have the misfortune of running into the next Ken Jennings, or hit a whammy and lose all your cash.
But getting on the show, that, it would seem, would require the greatest stroke of luck of all. Tens of thousands of people try, but only a few hundred are selected for each season. You’d almost have better luck standing in a cornfield waiting for a meteor to land next to you.
It used to be that you’d have to wait for a contestant search come to your city, mail in a postcard – or hundreds – and hope you’d be picked to come to the tryouts. Lord knows I spend enough money on 23 cent stamps whenever I read that the contestant search was coming to Portland, or Seattle, or anywhere within driving distance. Once there, you’d take a 50-question test taken from the expensive parts of the Jeopardy! board and, if you passed that, would then play a mock game and hope to impress the talent coordinators enough to get invited.
Hundreds of postcards got me nowhere. Ironically, several years ago, my then-girlfriend (now wife) mailed in one postcard, compared to my dozens – and was selected to attend a tryout in Portland in 2002. This was an article of much contention for several years in our household.
This year, however, Jeopardy! finally moved out of the Stone Age, relatively speaking, and introduced a new system: the Internet tryout. From the comfort of your computer chair, you could take the dreaded 50-question test. Pass, and get invited to a tryout in a city near you.
I do remember thinking that perhaps I should go into work and use the computers there, as my Internet connection at home was notoriously spotty, and I recall my wife calling from a conference about 30 seconds before the test began, and I had to quickly answer, tell her “notimetotalktimeforJeopardytest-gottagoloveyoubye” and hang up.
I don’t remember most the questions. Some seemed fairly easy, others impossible.
Fifteen minutes later, the little woman calls back. How did I do? Pretty good, I think. We’ll see what happens, I said, and thought no more about it.
Until this showed up in my Inbox in early May:
Congratulations! We are happy to confirm your appointment to participate in the full audition for Jeopardy!. That will consist of playing a "mock version" of Jeopardy! to assess your game-playing skills, a short personality interview, and being re-tested with a new 50-question test. If you pass all the requirements to become a contestant you will be entered into the contestant pool for one year. However even though you pass the test, we cannot guarantee that you will be invited to do the show. In fact, even though you are invited to the studio, there is no guarantee that you will appear on the show. You will be responsible for all expenses such as parking and travel to and from the audition center. If you are invited to Los Angeles to do the show you would also be responsible for expenses to come to Los Angeles.
The full audition will take approximately 2 Hours. This is the complete interview, no other interview will be necessary. Come dressed as you might for an actual appearance on the show. Only the person with the appointment will be allowed in the interview room; guests cannot wait outside the interview room.
Holy cats! I made the auditions!
Once I came down from Cloud Nine, I came to the realization that I’d better start boning up a little more. I pored over anything written by other Jeopardy! contestants about the show. Several have been written, but for me, the most useful was five-time champion Michael DuPee’s How To Get On Jeopardy!… And Win. It contained not only many useful tidbits of information that one might expect to encounter, but also his advice for impressing the tournament coordinators. Should you pass the written test, DuPee advised, and get to play the mock game, don’t worry about getting all the answers right – at this point, you have established that you’re plenty smart – what the coordinators are now looking for is two things:
First, can you follow directions: Can you wait until prompted to go to the next question? (no Derek Zoolanders, please.) Can you remember to answer in the form of a question? Can you remember the clues in the category name, that is, if the category is “’C’ in Science,” the answer is probably not going to be “what is vanadium?”
Second, can you play with some personality? They don’t want robots up there – they want people who will, once you get a question right, immediately jump to the next question, people who play with a bit of elan and at least appear to be having fun.
Form of a question? What is “no problem?” Personality? Sense of humor? Check.
My wife and I spent the Saturday before tryouts driving the six hours from the wilds of eastern Washington to Portland – I drove, she read me questions out of trivia books until she was both tired of reading them and carsick.
J-Hour, for me, was Sunday afternoon, 3:00 p.m., the last of the weekend’s auditions. My wife dropped me off at the Westin Hotel before going to spend the day at Powell’s Books (a.k.a. “The Happiest Place on Earth” for bibliophiles). I’m wore the exact same clothes I’d gotten married in the summer before, so hopefully there was still a little good karma in the pockets. There was a room reserved for us on the second floor, and there were about 30 people there; several would-be contestants and some members of the immediate family. Several forms needed to be filled out; various promises you pledge under threat of surrender of first-born child, and I needed to come up with five semi-lame anecdotes to share with America on the show. During all of this, Jeopardy! staffers were lining people up against the wall and taking Polaroids of each of us. I could only hope I avoided the dreaded Dick Cheney half-grin and red eye that shows up in many of my photographs. Fortunately, I’d given the skull a good shave and polish, and I have been told that I clean up pretty good. Who knew?
Once finished, those with loved ones said their goodbyes as we were taken – nineteen of us in all – into the ballroom, where our Jeopardy! future awaited.
Three buzzers were lying on the front table, and an overhead projector displayed a smaller version of the Jeopardy! board on a screen at the front of the room. Two long-time staffers from the show, Dave Sampugano and Glenn Kagan, where there to brief us and be Alex for the day.
Dave started with a little pep talk and informed us that over 10,000 people took the Internet test, and so many had passed that they’d had to go back to picking those who had passed at random (nice to know the luck of the draw went my way for once). He went on to describe how to use the buzzer, and reminded us to remember to speak loudly and clearly, and always, always, for the love of God always remember to phrase the answer in a form of a question.
Once we were sufficiently pumped up/mortified, there was a brief Q&A with Glenn and Dave (“What’s Alex Trebek like?” “Nice guy.”) and three lucky people were selected to begin the mock game. Those of us that weren’t promptly drove the Jeopardy! staff nuts by using our pens as practice clickers, complete with “click-click-click-click-click” noises. It took all of thirty seconds for Glenn to ask us to stop, please, please stop.
When I, along with two other would-be contestants, got a turn with the buzzer, we were told they weren’t really looking for timing – this is where the “following directions” and “playing like your having fun” part comes in.
Dave, you’re in control of the board. Oh, this is easy. “I’ll take ‘I Pity The Fool’ for $200!” Loud and clear; no one’s going to call me a wallflower at this point.
The question is: This character from A Midsummer Night’s Dream is better also known as Robin Goodfellow.
“Who is Puck?”
Oh yeah.
After everyone had a chance to ring in on a few questions, Glenn and Dave began the brief interview process. Glenn got to me and asked, “I see you used to be a computer game designer. Did you work on anything we might have heard of?”
Now, if I have one great weakness among my many, many flaws, it’s an inability to let an easy opportunity for a throwaway joke or sarcastic comment pass – as my wife, bless her heart, knows all too well. Like an undisciplined hitter sitting on a 3-0 count, if I see a meat pitch coming down the pipe, I have to swing at it.
“Are you familiar with games like Doom and Quake?” I replied.
Glenn seemed quite excited, after all, who hasn’t played Doom or Quake? “Why, yes!”
“Well, I didn’t do those.” As hoped, that got a big, big laugh from the room, and hopefully got me a passing grade in the “Does He Have Personality?” department.
I went on to describe what games I actually had worked on, and what I’d do with the money should I actually win on the show (trips to Greece and Italy with my archaeologist wife), and my time with the buzzer was done. Another tip from Michael DuPee, to paraphrase: If they ask what you’ll do with the money, don’t just say “invest it.” That’s boring, even if that’s all you’ll do. Say you’ll do something interesting with the cash, but stay away from booze and hookers.
Not that there’s anything wrong booze and hookers, but this is a family show.
After everyone had run through the mock game and the interview, the Jeopardy! crew wrapped it up with a second 50-question test, sans anyone looking over your shoulder at the computer and… that’s it. Thanks for coming, best of luck, don’t call us, we’ll call you, you don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here.
If I thought I could get away with skipping the ten blocks down to Powell’s Books without getting beaten up or looked at really weirdly, I would have – in my heart of hearts I knew I’d nailed it dead solid perfect. I cracked up the Jeopardy! crew and I was pretty darn sure that I’d gotten about 42 or 43 out of the fifty question correct – while no one has ever openly admitted that you need X right to pass the Jeopardy! test, it has long been believed that 35 was the cutoff point.
I had done what I needed to do, the rest was up to the Powers That Be. I could watch the phone anxiously for the next 300 days, or I could just keep watching the show and getting on with my life. For the sake of my sanity, I chose the latter.
Flash forward about two months. It was another mind-numbing day at work. When the cellphone rang, I figured it was my wife, but I don’t recognize the phone number, coming from a 410 area code. Who do I know from the 410 area code? Come to think of it, where the heck is the 410 area code? Hey, that’d be a good Jeopardy category…
Can I speak to Dave Meddish?
Yeeeesss… this is Dave.
Hi, Dave, this is Jeopardy! We need to check up on a few things. You still live at…
This wasn’t just a call. It might be The Call.
Yes, I still live at this address. No, I’m not running for office. No, I haven’t appeared on any other game shows in the last six months.
Congratulations, Dave, you’re going to be on Jeopardy! You’re scheduled to tape on…
Holy cats! I’m going to be on Jeopardy!
Continued in Part II: Showtime!