Putting Myself in Jeopardy

Back when our by now almost four-year-old was brand-new—not even four days old—I went someplace in downtown Atlanta to audition, as it were, for the Jeopardy! game show. (Note to copyeditors: technically the title is rendered with the exclamation point, though I’ll drop that from here on—and incidentally, before I became interested in becoming a contestant, I didn’t even know for sure how to spell “jeapordy.”) The group I was with, which consisted of well over a hundred people, was just one among many taking the quiz in Atlanta and other magnet-type cities. I think they had about a dozen testing sessions scheduled for my own city, and probably a dozen other cities with testing locations during that spring of 2002 as Alex Trebek and Company sought to round up some new blood for the game show.

I ended up being one of two people in my group who passed. I felt pretty good about that, naturally, but I’d also done my homework. There are a lot of web pages out there, for instance, by people who’ve competed on the show and have chosen, for whatever reason, to pass on some of their wisdom. For example, with Jeopardy you should always think in terms of the most obvious, commonly known thing within a given category: if the question is about English writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for instance, it’s more likely to involve William Shakespeare than Ben Jonson or Edmund Spenser. That kind of thing—oh, and you don’t need to waste time saying Shakespeare’s full name, because last names are sufficient, provided of course that you’ve phrased the answer in the form of a question.

So with the help of that research, along with a few quiz books I’d bought in the weeks leading up the test, I managed to get enough answers right that they didn’t disqualify me. Actually, now that I think of it, even getting to take the test was a matter of winning some kind of lottery, because out of the thousands and thousands of people who’d answered their call for new contestants, the show’s producers could only get around to reviewing just a few. Some time earlier, Deidre—who was the one behind this whole thing, as anybody who knows her can imagine—had signed me up for the chance to take the test, but I hadn’t “won.”

Now I had not only won a slot in the testing room, to which people from as far away as North Carolina had traveled, but I had won a chance to go up front, along with the other winner out of that room, and compete in a mock Jeopardy game to test our skills with spoken responses. I thought I did okay, though I’m not sure. At one point there was a question to which the answer (or should I say the answer to which the question) was Babe Ruth, and I got it right, but the tester noted that I didn’t need to bother to say “George Herman Ruth,” as I had done.

***

Beyond the ordinary degree to which we humans are just frail little pieces of dust with a jumble of easily hurt or inflated feelings housed inside, I didn’t gloat too much over my triumph. Some people can juggle, some people (I was never one of them) are good at basketball, some have bodies that others would supposedly die for—and I have this great ability to retain information and call it up when needed. Not that I have anything like the truly photographic memory of such exceptional figures as Truman Capote, whose brain was basically like a Xerox machine.

Here I have to digress for a moment (what? Me? Digress?) to say that Capote was a spectacular movie, and that Philip Seymour Hoffman absolutely deserved the Oscar. Heath Ledger was fabulous in Brokeback Mountain, too, but he’ll have other chances, and D and I have loved PHS from the first time we laid eyes on him as the ultra-jerky snobby rich kid in Scent of a Woman. Don’t let the name Capote fool you, as it did us initially, into thinking that this is just a yawning biopic covering the man’s whole life (though now that I’m reading the book on which it’s based, I can tell you that such a film would have been fascinating); rather, it covers the period from the murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, in 1959 until the execution of the killers, and the publication of Capote’s groundbreaking In Cold Blood, six years later.

But now where was I? Oh, yes, Alex, I’ll take “Killers from the Black-and-White Era, Which Made Everything Especially Scary Because the World Seemed So… Well, So Basic Back Then” for eight hundred dollars. The answer: “Of these two, Capote took an interest in the shorter, swarthier one, with whose painful past he developed an almost codependent sense of identification.” The question: “Who were Dick Hickok and Perry Smith?”

So about Jeopardy, the long and the short of it is that I passed the audition, or at least I supposed I did, but I never heard anything more from them. I suspected that this was in part because white males are the least attractive potential contestants, since they comprise the bulk of the pool from which those contestants are drawn. (And I’m not just a white male, but a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Male, who happens to be living in the first era in history when—thankfully—that doesn’t give me an instant advantage over everybody else.) But my theory about the contestant pool may be wrong anyway, because the other person who passed the test was a woman, and last I checked in with her—maybe nine months or a year after the test—they hadn’t called her either.

***

Because I had put myself on Jeopardy’s emailing list back then, I got things periodically that I disposed of without reading them—until I learned about testing scheduled to take place at 8:00 p.m. Eastern this past Tuesday. So I signed up to take the test again.

It was nerve-wracking the way they had it set up on their web site, with usernames and passwords and warnings to turn off pop-up blockers and not to try to log in prior to 7:45. When I did sign in, it spawned a little tiny window with Alex Trebek’s face and a countdown to the test.

This time around, I hadn’t done anything to prepare, but while I was waiting for the countdown, I had to do something. I didn’t dare leave my desk—Deidre had ensured that no kids would be bursting in to show me a purse full of found objects or to get me to sharpen a pencil that had gone dull—but I had to have something to while away those excruciating minutes, so I did the first part of the Mensa workout. You’re supposed to time yourself on that one, and I had never found the opportunity to clear all the decks in order to do the test properly (mainly because to me its purpose is recreation and nothing more), but I managed to while away a few minutes trying to find number patterns and the like. If you peek at the test, I’ll tell you that I answered about half a dozen of the questions, but the one about months and numbers completely stumped me, whereas the ones asking to explain the meaning behind common sayings seemed ridiculously easy.

And then, finally, the clock counted down and the test was on, by which time I’d closed all other windows and focused myself entirely on the questions. Again there were fifty of them, and (again) unlike a regular Jeopardy game, there were fifty different topics, with fifteen seconds allotted for each answer. How did I do? I don’t know, really, because the test just flew by so quickly, though I do recall a few where I felt quite pleased to whip out the answer long before my fifteen seconds were up: The mentally imbalanced Roman emperor whose name meant “little boots”? Caligula. The branch of chemistry dealing with carbon-containing compounds? Organic. And the team Ray Lewis led to Superbowl victory? I said the Ravens, though with what I know about football, I could easily have been wrong; I just remembered an Atlanta scandal involving Lewis from ages ago.

But I know I missed plenty. Afterward, when I was telling Deidre about some of the stumpers, which I remembered better at that moment than I do now, it seemed like she had the answer to everything. It was almost comical: “And another one,” I said, “under the category ‘Ten-Letter Words’: an assembly of lawmakers, based on the French word for talk”: “Parliament,” she shot back, and I did one of those “I coulda had a V-8” gestures.

As for Jeopardy’s policy on letting you know how you did, they’ll only tell you if you passed, and then only after they’ve tabulated the results. Supposing I did pass, they’ve now chosen not to do testing in Atlanta anymore, so I’d have to go down to Orlando (on my own steam, of course), do another test, and then have a chance to compete in a mock game—which would put me back where I was four years ago, a little like a lovelorn highschooler waiting for the phone to ring.

Compared to that, actually working for a living seems easy!