the Jeopardy! audition
Back in June of 2007, I auditioned for a spot as a contestant on Jeopardy! I wrote it as an email to my mom and my sister, and didn’t publish it previously, because they swore us to strict confidentiality about the process. By now, I think the statute of limitations has elapsed, or possibly I don’t care anymore. In any case, here’s what I wrote then, edited a bit.
I had my Jeopardy! audition yesterday. I have no way of knowing this, because they give us zero feedback, of course, but I felt pretty good about things. The audition was at the Waldorf, run by two folks, Maggie and Tony, with absurdly exaggerated, upbeat personalities - Tony had a big laugh at the end of every sentence, while Maggie appeared to be mainlining caffeine. (There was also a technology guy who said very little but laughed a lot, and a very pretty, businesslike, silent woman sitting in the corner and taking a couple of notes every minute or two. I took her to be the eminence grise of the operation. I sensed that a fair amount of what we did was misdirection - sort of like when they take you to lunch on a job interview and talk about everything but the job, and that’s where they decide whether you’re the person they want or not.)
We first sat in a hallway at the Waldorf and filled out green applications, mostly straightforward stuff but with a couple little unnecessary-seeming personal details thrown in. People were mostly stony-faced about things, sizing each other up. Everybody seemed to have read the line about “dress as you would for an appearance on the show.” Then they called us into the meeting room they’d booked, and gave us all Jeopardy! pens, and Tony took our picture with a Polaroid camera, and said “Wonderful! Ha-ha!” after every one, and then we sat for a minute in a little bar area (Tony: “I drank all the liquor already! Ha-ha!”) I tried to make small talk with the older, nervous-looking man next to me, whose wife was not allowed in the audition room, and he said “Nhngh?” and I left it at that. I think I counted fourteen men and eight women. There usually seem to be more men than women on the show, so I wonder what self-selection goes on, and what Tony and Maggie (and Her Eminence Grise) do to counterbalance it.
Then we walked into the meeting room proper, where there was a big projection screen in front of four rows of tables. Maggie launched into an orientation, and asked a couple of Jeopardy! trivia questions to get things rolling. “What was the name of the person who beat Ken Jennings?” was one, and a woman sitting behind me knew the answer, and I started to worry that I was out of my trivia league. The second was answered by the nervous man - “Who was the first game show host to have a moustache?”, Alex Trebek being the second - and I had to admire his figuring it out: Groucho Marx.
Then he corrected himself: “Who was Groucho Marx?”
And then Maggie did her thing, and talked about former contestants, and how the day was going to run, and reminded us it’s a GAME show, so we should have fun, and made a couple of jokes, and said a little more about the process, and some other contestants, and how the signaling devices work, and a few more contestant stories, and things not to do, and a little more about flying out to L.A., and the third place contestant gets $1,000 and second place gets $2,000, and some more stories, and something about Bob Dylan, and a lot about Ken Jennings, and some more jokes, and asked a few questions, and told us to be sure to use our big voices, or teaching voices, or whatever we call them. I spoke up once or twice, being sure to use what I once would once have called my teaching voice and now think of as my “get our little leaguers to pay attention to OUR game” voice. And I smiled constantly and laughed out loud way more than Maggie’s material deserved.
Maggie turned things over to Tony and disappeared, perhaps to tie off an arm and shoot up some more Red Bull. Tony showed us a movie featuring the “Clue Crew” about five things to remember as a Jeopardy! contestant, none of which I can recall as of today. The movie ended with Alex reminding us to have fun - “It’s a GAME show.” Tony then walked us through deciphering some of the clues, a little bit as if none of us had ever watched Jeopardy! before, but with some good pointers mixed in (like, pay attention to the word “this” or “these,” and starting with the “after” part of one of the stupid “Before and After” clues is often easier. He explained that the correct formula for a response is “Who is …” or “What is …” - “Don’t go up there and say “Why is President Lincoln?” He didn’t laugh as much here - this was clearly the serious part of the day, leading up to our 50-question test.
The test consisted of questions projected on the screen and read by the Clue Crew; we had eight seconds to figure it out and move on. There was no going back afterward, and we were instructed not to take notes - the reason they gave made no sense, and I suspect the real reason was that they wanted a truer sense of whether we could come up with the answer in eight seconds. We were told we should guess, and not to panic if we skipped a question and got the numbering wrong; they’d figure it out. Again, I wondered whether following directions and paying attention was part of the selection criteria. Anyway, this was almost exactly the same as I had remembered from my Jeopardy! audition of 15 years earlier, so I was feeling prepared for it. (Fifteen years earlier I didn’t get past the written-test stage, though.)
We had been instructed not to tell anyone the questions, not that I can remember them, or that it would matter, at this remove. I will tell you that about 30 minutes later, a propos of nothing, someone in the room muttered, “Oh, The Stranger,” to which Tony responded, “He just got the answer! Ha-ha!” A couple of early questions threw me, but I reminded myself throughout to trust my first instinct. I used my own pen, not the cheap Jeopardy! pen they gave us, and I was sure that helped. By the end I felt like I had kicked the test’s ass, in a 47-out-of-50 kind of way.
Then Her Eminence and Tony collected our papers: Polaroids on top, then our applications, then our test sheets, then the five things we had been told to write about ourselves prior to the audition. They took them off to the other room to score them, while people used the restroom and the rest of us talked amongst ourselves. Sitting in front of me was Lois, a large woman from Vermont with her hair done up unfashionably and wearing a colorful print dress. We talked about the advantages and disadvantages of age - I of the opinion that it’s better to be able to remember things from life rather than from history books; she noting that after a certain point you start getting questions about rock-and-roll bands that you will just never know.
Maggie coached us some more about using signaling devices, and using our nice big voices, and told us more contestant stories, and about the hotel near the studio where they have discounts, and how likely it was we would be asked to fly to L.A. and then not appear the way the terms described (not likely; just legalese, she said, and the only time it had happened was after an earthquake). And keeping the game moving, and the running bet they have about who can guess the final Jeopardy answer before the clue was revealed. She told us, somewhere in there, that in the next part of the audition they were going to call us up three at a time to play a simulated game in front of everyone else.
Then Tony and Her Eminence came back with the stack of papers, and Maggie looked at the first one. “Where’s Chris?” she asked. I stuck up my hand and said “Me?” and she said yes and asked me if I had ever auditioned for Jeopardy! before.
“About fifteen years ago,” I said, brightly, in my calling-to-Kevin-in-right-field voice.
“I thought so - you seem really familiar to me,” she replied.
Now, either Maggie had a phenomenal memory, or far more likely she had confused me with someone else, but I realized it was not the time to cavil about such things, and just smiled and walked up to the front. Nervous Man, who had been sitting next to me, and a woman sitting further down our row were called to the front as well. I didn’t know whether to take it as an omen that my test appeared at the top of the stack.
They handed us signaling devices and Maggie told me I was playing the role of returning champion. “Welcome back,” she said, “what did you do during the hiatus?”
“I went to Fiji,” I said, playing along. “Ha-ha!” said Tony. “Oooh,” said someone behind me, as if she believed I had really gone to Fiji, which was a little odd.
As “returning champion” I got to pick first, and I selected “Spot The Pooch” for $200. Somewhere along the way - the categories were the same ones Tony had been using in his clue-decoding seminar - I’d figured out how that category was going to work and I decided it would be a comfortable place to start. Maggie said “Good!” in response to my category choice, which I remember because I was wondering whether my choice said something good about me or it was simply my calling-to-Kevin voice that she liked. There were three words, one of which I recognized as related to dogs, and when the little lights went out indicating we could ring in, I clicked my button several times quickly, just as instructed, and said “Masti - what is ‘mastiff’"?” “Right,” said Tony. “Let’s try ‘Spot The Pooch’ for 4” I said, and Maggie said “Good” again, I know not why, but perhaps because I’d kept the game moving.
One of my competitors got this one, and on it went for a dozen questions or so. I was hesitant to ring in on questions I didn’t know, and then decided it looked bad not to ring in, so I rang in on a couple I wasn’t sure about and looked like a fool, and then started worrying about whether that was better or not. And I recognized that in the game play, as opposed to the written test, I wasn’t trusting my instincts and I out-thought myself a couple times. One of the stupid “Before and After” clues had to do with pirate-ship flags, and I thought of Jolly Roger and then started thinking about whether that referred to the flag or the ship, and isn’t it the Skull and Crossbones? and then I rang in so as not to be a bump on a log, and came up with the name Bannister, but I couldn’t manage “What is Jolly Roger Bannister?” before time ran out. So clearly some practicing would have helped. And to another clue, about foxhunting, I said “What are bloodhounds?” instead of either “foxhounds” or just “hounds,” so I missed that one. Which I tried to take in good humor.
After every question Maggie would give some encouragement or correct our button-pressing or remind someone to use a nice big voice. I started to consider that the audition might have been more nerve-wracking than being on the show. I was trying not only trying to ring in and get the questions right; I was also trying to impress the judges and look cheerful and ring in with the right frequency AND to get the questions right. And I was processing this experience. (Of course, on the show you’re processing a studio audience and lights and the star power of Alex Trebek mere feet away.)
Finally Maggie told one of us, not me, to select the last question, and then it was on to the interviews. I was up first, and Maggie told me “What a nice smile you have - you’re always smiling.” I figured this could not be a bad thing - she had said something earlier about how the audience wants to see people having fun. I explained that you need to smile when you’re working with kids. She asked me about that and I talked about the theater company, Falconworks, and it was a great story and Maggie and at least a few people behind me made approving noises of one sort or another. I don’t know what Tony and the tech guy were doing; I was pretty locked into Maggie. She asked if it was wonderful to see the smiles on the kids’ faces when their play was being performed, and I explained that usually the kids are in the play, “so sometimes it’s a look of terror - but the smiles afterward are pretty priceless.” Laughs and more approving noises. “What do you do to have fun?” Maggie asked. I was totally unprepared for this and said something about coaching baseball and taking vacations, “not with kids.” That one seemed to clank. “And what will you do if you win a lot of money on Jeopardy!?” I explained that there’s no money in running a not-for-profit, so winning money would help let me keep doing that until we got the organization on its own feet.
On to Nervous Man, who was a librarian, and stammered a lot, and wants to travel. And the woman next to him, about whom I can tell you nothing, except that if she wins a lot of money she wants to travel. And then we all sat down and the next three got up to do the same thing, and I was able to relax and continue laughing too much at Maggie’s jokes.
Lois, of the colorful print dress, turned out to be a retired bureaucrat - her word - who now does botanical painting. There was a doctor who couldn’t think of the word “patella” in the category “‘Pit’ or ‘Pat,’” and a stock trader, and a cop from Brooklyn, and a couple schoolteachers, and a stem-cell researcher from Yale, and a census taker from Canada who went to the same university as Alex Trebek. Nearly everyone, it turns out, wants to travel to France, or possibly to buy a home in France. One guy finally changed things up by saying he wanted to travel to Madagascar, and it struck me that that answer might have given him an edge.
The other contestants answered a lot of questions I didn’t have a clue about, particularly in movie and geography categories, so along with practicing not panicking, I started to feel I had some boning up to do. But I knew a few that stumped them, too.
Eventually we were done. I was certain that going first was to my advantage, but it sure made the rest of the afternoon drag. There wasn’t much ceremony at the end: “We’ll be in touch, we’ll try to give you three or four weeks’ notice, and if we don’t call you it’s just because there are many more qualified contestants each year than we can have on the show.” And off we went. I went home to coach baseball and use my calling to Kevin voice on Kevin.
Epilogue: I waited patiently, but the call from Sony Pictures Studios never came. I was disappointed, of course, but in retrospect it’s hard to imagine the actual show could have been much more fun than the audition. At least, as long as you don’t factor in a trip to France.