Jeopardy tryouts – part two

I didn’t hear much laughter out in the “Pre-event” area, as the Sheraton floorplan calls it, as the Jeopardy coordinators scored the tests, but I hopefully my stupidity got a chuckle, anyway. They could not, we had been informed, tell us how we did. I kind of expected that, as that’s the reason I took screencaps of the online test – you don’t find out there either, and I wanted to a) remember more than the fraction of questions I knew I’d be able to think of after and b) check my answers. (My instinct is that this policy is so that they can feel free to cast someone who didn’t test as well but who had a great TV personality instead of someone who aced the test but was a stick in the mud.) Apparently, they did testing at Princeton, and had some fear of losing their lives, or at least a couple of limbs, when they announced they couldn’t give out scores – I guess it makes sense that Ivy League students are pretty serious about grades!

The pen again – isn’t it purty?

In the next phase, Maggie and Robert had us practice “ringing in” using our Jeopardy! pens, with the bright orange clicker button. (If they really loved us they’d make pens the size of the signalling device – which is actually rather smaller, I think than the 1.5 inch diameter I’d seen somewhere – more like 1″.) Here’s where my practice while watching the show started to pay off. A question would appear on the screen, and there would be three dots on each side of the rectangle. They would be dark as Sarah was, again, reading the question, and then as soon as she finished they would light up: the signal that it was time to ring in. In the real thing – and the mock game – ringing in too early would lock you out for half a second. If someone got a question wrong, the lights would light again and it would again be safe to ring in. After we played with our pens for a second, we went through a few rounds of sticking up our hands and waiting to be called on. I believe there were eighteen questions, and twenty of us; I know Melissa wasn’t called on. I was – and have no recollection of the moment. I know I perked up a little – bizarrely – that there was a basketball category, but it turned out to be one of those “literal” categories in which “A form of energy associated with the motion of atoms or molecules” meant “What is the Heat?” Again, no application for any of the studying.

Then came the scary part. (Not as scary as the headshot, but scary.) We would be called up in groups of three to the front of the room, each given a buzzer, and would as closely as possible replicate actual game play. Six familiar columns appeared on the screen (with only three questions per category), we were reminded how to proceed – answers in the form of a question (in the first round, forgetting that would on the show result in “Alex giving you the stinkeye offscreen”, but reminders would be given; in Double Jeopardy forgetting simply resulted of course in a wrong answer), wait for the moment to ring in, don’t answer till called on, then sing out the category and dollar amount where you wanted to go next. Don’t, Maggie cautioned, take shortcuts here; “Crossword Clues D” could be called “Crossword” if desired – they would know which category you meant – but it would be risking forgetting the important part of the category: this is when you might forget the “D” in quotes and yell “What is Cuyahoga!” and wonder why everyone was groaning. (Funnily enough this is exactly what a former champion advises players to do – leave out that important part, so as to trip up the other two in just that way. Just, of course, don’t forget it yourself.) So: three at a time, run through several questions, then one by one introduce yourself and tell us something about you, and chat with Maggie and Robert.

I was in, I think, the third group called up; the other two beat me by few seconds, and someone queried where I was, so just said “Sorry! Short legs!” and chugged on up. (“And from the back of the room!” Maggie laughed.) And so it began. And I started to get scared, because question after question went by and I had no idea how to take any of them. About five questions in I rang in more to prove I was still alive than anything else – and they called me. Of course. I wound up having to try to come up with the president of eBay. I should have known it … and … didn’t. I floundered, one of them prompted “Who is – ?” Which didn’t help; I repeated it and then just said “Margaret Thatcher”, and … oh well. I’ll never forget Meg Whitman now. Happily, I kind of hit my stride a few seconds later, and rang in – and correctly answered – a few more … and almost fell over when a category came up on the screen called “Prisoners in the Tower of London”. Shut. Up. I was dying to get in there. Someone called for the $200 question, and I blanked – I should have gotten Thomas More, God knows, and dang it I knew I should have read Wolf Hall, and then I finally had my chance. I got something right (no idea what) and said – just as Maggie called out “Last question!” – “Tower of London for six, please” – and the second the answer appeared on the screen I smiled. No, it wasn’t Rudolph Hess – but it was William Wallace, and I rang in, and got it right, and that was that.

I wish I could remember the other questions. No idea. I do remember getting one and Maggie saying “I had a feeling that one was up your alley” – which was funny, ’cause how would she know where my alley was? She was right, though. She’s goooood.

Somewhere out there I had read that the buzzer – officially called the signaling device – was problematic; it was either too sensitive or took a solid thwack of the thumb to register. I didn’t notice either; I was comfortable. The whole procedure came weirdly naturally.

Then came the mini interviews. I was shockingly un-nervous. The first person (in the returning champion position) was the girl who had been interrogated by the strange random lady in the hall; she was great. Next was my fellow Connecticut-er (why can’t I remember names?), and he did very well too – he’s an artist, and went to the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts (*envy*). Then there was me. I tried to project, introduced myself as an office manager from CT – and mentioned that they had called up the two Connecticuties in the same group. I have no idea where that came from. Yes, I am embarrassed. Hey, we don’t have a good name, and we were cute as hell. A lot of the questions were coming straight from the Five-Things-About-Me sheets, I could tell, and I waited to be asked about locking my finger in the car door or the teddy bears I make or why my family laughed in the cemetery, but they started out with what I like to do. I said I love to read, and write – and, as I put in my notes, I was talking to a friend once and a phrase struck me that fit so well I’ve used it ever since: “I put the ‘dent’ in ‘sedentary’.” And everyone laughed. That’s a good feeling, that is. They asked what I write, and this blog didn’t even come to mind, although I’ve probably logged more words here than in any manuscript, but I talked a little about the book – and, shockingly, I did not stumble over it. (Once in a job interview the writing came up and I blithered on something along the lines of “It’s a fantasy novel – an adult fantasy – not THAT kind of fantasy, but just you know oh dear”. Yeah. Somehow I didn’t get that job.) As far as I remember, I spoke up, I spoke clearly, I answered in relatively complete sentences, and I was coherent. And I made them laugh – on purpose. And before that I correctly answered several questions, ringing in properly and beating out the other two. It wasn’t bad at all. *deep sigh of relief*

The one question everyone was asked was “What will you do with your Jeopardy money?”, and I had variations on the theme going through my head – get rid of the mortgage, buy a sword, help put my nieces through college, go back myself, take my mother to Newfoundland, etc. Of course they all went out of my head. Some of the answers were excellent – especially the ones who wanted to do something for someone close to them; some weren’t so hot, like … I’m not sure it was too wise to exclaim that you were taking the money to the casino to blow it all; the next day on “So You Think You Can Dance” Nigel noted to one girl that it might not be the best idea to list as your claim to fame that you can fart with your neck, and I put the casino thing in the same bin. But that’s me. What I ended up blurting out was “Travel! Oh, everywhere – England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales” … I should have said “England for Shakespeare and Tolkien and Sayers, Ireland and Scotland to do some genealogical investigation, and Wales for Doctor Who” … Oh well.

And then I sat down. My part was over. Five weeks of intermittent studying on everything I could think of, and a whole lot of nerves, and it was over. I sat and watched the rest of the group go up – and every single one was a contender – and could just enjoy it like a series of mini-episodes (it was hard not to yell out answers – that’s going to be the challenge if it ever goes farther, I think, though the concentration was solid enough in the mock game that maybe it won’t be).

The numbers bear repeating. Maggie told us some statistics which, even if this is the end of this trip, kind of create a warm glow:

- 100,000 people took the online test.

- 1-2000 people were called for auditions.

- Of those, some 400 will be called to Hollywood.

I feel like Nigel Lythgoe sent me to Vegas and I made it through the week. Now I just wait for him or Adam Shankman or Lil C to show up at my house and tell me yes or no…

Wait – for eighteen months. It’s gonna be hard to get through that kind of time period with so many digits crossed.

And that’s it – that’s my big event. Quite possibly the biggest thing that’s ever happened to me, whatever happens next (or doesn’t). I highly recommend the experience – wait! No I don’t! All you smart people who would be competing with me for a place, don’t do it. It was horrid. Really. Trust me.

And now – back to real life …

Real life with quite a bit of studying, that is.

 

Jeopardy tryouts – part one

It was around 2:30 last Tuesday (last Tuesday! It’s been a week!) that I couldn’t stand it anymore and just went to find Conference Room K, where it all was happening.

We didn’t get juice

A very short elevator ride brought me to the Lower Level, and I saw the sign for the show and smiled. Since there were only a couple of people there I went looking for a ladies’ room to freshen up, as they say. I started a circuit around the central elevator block, and was impressed by the elegance of the place. This was not a conference area for the likes of the meetings I’ve been to – this was CEO and VIP territory, and quite nice too. In fact, when I looped back around to “our” area again to find a small crowd had formed, there was apparently a bit of a question going forward about who all this riff-raff was, because the woman whom I shortly found out was Maggie (Maggie Speak, the main contestant coordinator for the show) (what a great job) was explaining that yes, we’d all be out of the way shortly, and we were a motley crew (almost typed crue) but very smart! When the investigating officer was gone, she said to the group at large that there was one very expensive, very exclusive hotel they occasionally used for tryouts, and how much she loved having all of these expensively-suited folk about, and then her lot sitting on the floor filling out applications. Hee.

I fell into a line which led – to my horror – to Robert, the gentleman wielding the Polaroid camera. It wasn’t Robert I dreaded – he was lovely; it was the camera. I kept telling myself Don’t smile – don’t smile! I photograph very badly, and when I laugh it’s even worse. There’s only been one picture I’ve liked in the past few years, and that was (weirdly) a driver’s license picture for which I did not smile; in the next one I looked like I’d been hit on the head with a bottle. I wasn’t planning on looking grim or anything; I just wanted to project whatever good things I could manage without looking like that bad driver’s license. Oh well. Robert is tall, and funny, and made some comment as I moved into place, and I laughed; then he scrunched down to get down to my eye level to take the thing, his knees bending almost 90 degrees – and I couldn’t help it. I laughed as the &*$! flash went off. The results were dreadful, as expected. I avoided looking at that thing as much as possible. *sigh*

I realized then that there was paperwork to be done, and grabbed a page – and a Jeopardy pen! – from the table, and wandered further down the hall to a counter to fill out the application. It was kind of funny – one question on the application was whether the applicant had been in touch with any Jeopardy contestants, and I marked “no” – and then second-guessed myself: after all, I exchanged comments on the blog of a gentleman who went through the tryouts: Oh. Tryouts. OK. I don’t think being on Ken Jennings’ Tuesday Trivia mailing list would count, so I needn’t worry about perjury.

Something odd happened around then; a woman appeared out of nowhere (which just means I didn’t notice where she came from) and accosted an older woman who was standing near me, off apart from the rest of the group.

“What are you all waiting for?”
“We’re going to play Jeopardy.”
“Why are you going to do that?”
“We’re trying out for the show.”

And it kept on – why? Why? It was a weird exchange – the woman shooting off questions in a strange flat tone, more like a small child wanting to know “why” than an adult of any sort of authority wanting to know what this motley crew was doing there. Then she abruptly said something like “I see the person I need to speak to”, and walked away. By now I had moved over a little; in one of those peculiar impulses psychologists like to study most of the group had formed a rough circle in the space by the table, and I had joined the herd. This interloper walked past me, on the near side of the ring, crossed the empty space of the middle, and beelined for a girl on the other side. I didn’t catch what she said to her, but the girl – whose name I really should remember – but it ended with “Good luck getting on Jeopardy” in that same flat tone, and then the interloper left, leaving her victim standing there looking completely what-the-*&$!-was-that baffled.

A few stragglers were photographed and wrangled into place, and then we were shown into Conference Room K. I was near the back of the pack, and so snagged a seat near the back of the room, which was fine with me. At the front of the room were two tables, the one on the left being where the coordinators sat (when they sat). In between was a projection screen. There was a moment of surreality – it’s happening! Now! – and then Maggie and Robert began talking, giving pointers and guidelines for how the next couple of hours were going to go. Be enthusiastic – don’t be quiet! – use a big voice, and, most importantly, enjoy yourself!

Robert asked who watched Jeopardy every night, and I think every hand went up – to which he replied with a chuckle that there were some liars in the room. Well, really, though – I had actually stopped watching because another station started airing M*A*S*H with scenes included that have hitherto always been cut when I’ve seen the show in syndication, and that’s been too much fun to pass up. Since that first email arrived, though, I think I missed two nights. Srsly. (For one thing, I was practicing. Wait till Alex finishes reading the question – and – cue rapid-fire pretend ringing-in. Answer in the form of a question. It was all surprisingly difficult to coordinate in the beginning – I was used to just sitting there blurting out the answers as soon as I knew them, and never in the form of questions. I was a mess those first few nights I tried it, and gained a huge amount of sympathy for all those folks who can’t get their act together on the show. But you know? It helped.)

Then he said that Jeopardy is the number two game show – what’s number one? Wheel of Fortune. How many people watch Wheel? I don’t think a single hand went up, and he laughed at us again – “Look at all the Jeopardy snobs!” I guess so.

Next question: who thought the online test was a piece of cake? My hand stayed firmly down. Cake? No. Soufflé, maybe. Baklava. Something tricky to make. Cake? I can do cake. That was not cake.

And then he asked “Okay, how many of you were surprised to get the email?” Surprised? Shocked. I don’t know if I said it in the original post, but when I opened it both hands clapped over my mouth, and I literally couldn’t talk – or breathe – for a minute. I scared my mother. Yeah. I was a little surprised. I was happy to see most of the hands in the room go up.

“How many of you yell out the answers when you’re watching the show?” Everyone, I think – and, of course, we were gently reminded that wasn’t going to fly then and there.

We went around the room, introducing ourselves – I have no idea what I said. I only remember that I said I was from Connecticut, and Maggie said “Connekt-i-cut – that’s how I have to remember it!” I was a little surprised that while the vast majority of the twenty of us in the group were from New York, there were only two of us from CT – the other one a young man on the other side of the room – and one from Pennsylvania (if her name wasn’t Melissa I will be deeply ashamed of myself, because she was sitting right next to me – my memory is not Jeopardy calibre!) – and two ladies from Florida and one from Washington state! One gentleman (whose name I really, really should remember) was the father of the winner of 2007′s teen tournament (*search* Meryl Federman). At least a couple, including the man who sat behind me (Craig? Curse my spotty memory!) had tried out before – I believe my seat-neighbor had done it a couple of times. And something that was lovely about that was that Maggie remembered everyone who had been by before. She knew Meryl’s dad, and chatted with him very warmly; she remembered Craig (better than I do, since I’m not sure his name was Craig) and chatted with him; when one woman was called up for the mock game she said “You’ve been here before, haven’t you?” When the woman said yes – a few years before, iirc – Maggie apologized for not having picked her out before, and reminisced with her as well. Now, I grant, by that point she had the applications in front of her, but for the rest of the returnees it was purely her. Did I mention she’s kind of awesome?

The first part of the process was the dreaded written test. There was a video first, stressing the important points – don’t answer in the form of a question, spelling doesn’t count as long as it’s comprehensible, last names are fine unless it’s a President Roosevelt sort of situation, and so on. And there was a little clip of Alex reiterating what Maggie said, and what everyone I’d talked to in the month prior had said – don’t stress, just have fun! Our coordinators added to this that there was a lot of leeway given. When in doubt, they said, guess; you might not want to do this on the show, but in the test there’s no penalty for a wrong answer, so take a shot – if nothing else we’d give them something to laugh about while scoring the tests. Did I say a good bit of leeway? Don’t worry, they said: if you skip a line at some point, because they would adapt to the answer to #21 being put in the slot for #22. I didn’t have to worry about that one, because I at least took a wild flailing guess on each question (and got one right I never expected to. I’m still amazed.) Questions were going to appear on the screen at the front of the room, and be read by Sarah from the Clue Crew (which, I think it was generally agreed, has the best job in the world).

I had read that where with the online test you had 15 seconds, with the written test each question only allowed eight – alarming! But in truth it wasn’t too bad. It seemed to be a consensus that it actually felt like you had more time. Either the atmosphere was more relaxed – as the coordinators certainly tried to make it, plus any time you don’t have a little timer ticking off the seconds it’s going to be less stressful – or it was simply that it’s faster and more intuitive to write than to type, but it just seemed easier to put the answers in the correct spaces when it was pen (Jeopardy pen!) on paper. Too, it was wonderful to be able to take a (literal) couple of seconds here and there and go back and reconsider answers I wasn’t sure about. There were a couple of questions that made me smile and write very quickly – and I’d love to say which ones but we all promised not to reveal the questions on the written test since it’s the one used universally – and with four or five seconds left it was possible to go back and say “Oh! Wait!” Not, unfortunately, that that happened with too many; I can only remember about twenty of the fifty questions, and several of those were the ones I was pretty sure I was getting wrong (remembered because I kept going back over them). The happy thing about that is there were two I was pretty sure I had wrong, and in fact I was right; there was one I knew I had right, realized I had wrong, and then re-realized I was actually right. (To try to explain that mess of a sentence, it was a little bit as if I wrote down ” X-Men – Origin of Wolverine” and then two days later realized in horror it should have been “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” – and then realized that the actual answer was only the character name, and, happily seeing that at the time, I had crossed out the “X-Men – Origin of” part anyway leaving just “Wolverine” which was, in the end, correct.)(Which is not what the answer was.)

It was fun. I like tests. Sue me. And I think I did all right on this one; I feel like I did better on it than on the online test, and if the online test got me that far, well then – ! Also, I kept in mind what they had said about laughing while they graded, and went for humor when intelligence failed; let’s say one of the questions was about a desert (which it wasn’t), and I couldn’t for the life of me think of what they wanted – so I just said “the hot one”. Hey, partial credit, maybe. I could feel the cogs turning on a couple, and was pleased with what I did get right, and couldn’t entirely blame myself for getting wrong most of what I missed … I should have spent more time on geography, I can tell you that, especially since as it turns out not a single other thing I studied in the five weeks leading up to June 5 turned out to be relevant. Not one. Almost, but not quite.

They collected the tests, the 5-things-about-me sections of the email, the dread photos, and the applications, and I wonder if it counts in their consideration whether people listened and put them in the order they asked for, and then took the packets off back outside to grade the tests. We were, they said, allowed to talk about the test, but not to disclose the questions to anyone outside the room – though, they said, the questions from the online test were free for discussion anytime. I had taken screencaps of the online test to check my answers after the fact, but didn’t want to put them up anywhere just in case. So the three of us in the back of our group went over some of the questions, and yes I am indeed a geographical moron. Just sayin’. Still and all, there was the story someone had told me about an aunt who tried out who aced the test as well as the mock game, and never got on the actual show because, it was thought, she would just dominate too thoroughly. Which would be boring. Me? I’ll be making crap up in the geography categories – I won’t be boring. Promise.

To be continued …

Related articles

• Jeopardy tryouts: been there, done it, and got the pen to prove it (agoldoffish.wordpress.com)

 

The Jeopardy saga – bookend edition

I admit it – after having studied intermittently full-tilt for the past five weeks, I’ve vegetated since I got home from New York. I hadn’t been reading nearly as much for pleasure (by which I mean “for Netgalley”) in the last month +, and started making up for a little lost time. So, finally, here we go. This is – for benefit of my own lapse-prone memory – the account of the New York journey apart from the audition – what we did before and after. The during will be the next post, for the benefit of anyone who couldn’t care less where we ate. : ) For details of the actual tryout, please skip to the next posts…

I can’t believe it’s been a week.

On Monday afternoon I tried (and failed) to finish the Eyewitness Guide to London I’d begun, and got as far as the Tower of London – where there was a fascinating little note that Rudolph Hess had been held there in 1941, which led me to looking into the whole story. I did finish working my way through the presidents, trying to fix the order in my mind along with VP’s (a shocking number of vice presidents died in office) and college affiliations and suchlike. I had thought a lot about how to fill out the email they sent me:

IF YOU BECOME A CONTESTANT ON “JEOPARDY!” WE NEED TO KNOW SOME INTERESTING BITS OF INFORMATION ABOUT YOU TO BE USED DURING OUR ON-CAMERA INTERVIEW WITH ALEX TREBEK.
PLEASE LIST 5 BRIEF BITS ABOUT YOURSELF BELOW. THEY ONLY NEED TO BE ONE-LINERS.
TELL US ABOUT YOUR JOB, HOBBIES, EMBARRASSING MOMENTS, CLAIMS TO FAME, (AWARDS, HONORS, ETC.) YOUR WILDEST AMBITION OR SOME UNUSUAL THINGS YOU COLLECT.

Oh. Kay. I’m not that interesting (don’t tell them I said that). It might be entertaining to come out with the fact that I didn’t finish high school, but I decided not to go there. I believe the five things I wound up with were, in some order or other:

1) Most embarrassing moment? That would be the time I locked my finger in the car door.

2) I make hand-stitched teddy bears

3) When my family gets together, we laugh – even at the cemetery

4) My favorite occupations are reading and writing – I put the “dent” in “sendentary”

5) I once flew across the country to attend a wedding at which I’d never met the bride, groom, or any of the guests, including the ones I stayed with for several days.

Of course I’ve been thinking of all sorts of alternatives – like “three of the greatest moments of my life were being thrown by a pony, run away with on a horse, and growled at by a wolf”, and “My uncle smuggled a Shetland pony on the ferry as a Christmas present for my cousins”, and “I have more books in my home than some town libraries”, and “I’ve worried my parents by always acing ‘Potent Potables’ since I was about ten”. Next time. (I thought of putting that last one down when the bunch of us went out for Mother’s Day, and an hour later it was as thoroughly gone from my mind as if I’d been hypnotized. I just remembered it. *sigh*)

I printed as neatly as I could, and then suddenly read:

PLEASE PRINT, COMPLETE, AND BRING WITH YOU TO THE TRYOUT

*&$! I had printed it a few times, which was good; I put together a full copy of the email, and then it struck me that I didn’t really want to fold it all up. The only thing I could find was a manila folder (which was marked “Children”, from when I was in art school and used to keep a photo morgue, yes I’m old), which seemed like a good idea at the time.

That night I did all sorts of silly things to get ready: painted one pinky nail a la Drop Dead Diva (not Ironic Taffy, though); tucked a few totems into my pocketbook (the horn belonging to a Boromir action figure, the Star Trek badge my nieces gave me, my sonic screwdriver (which doubles as a pen, so at least it’s practical!) … I know, shush. None of it weighed much of anything, and a little outbreak of superstition never hurts unless there’s fire involved). I finished making notes on the presidents, still stunned at how many vice presidents died in office. I made sure I had the “five things about you” etc. in its folder somewhere I couldn’t lose it. And then I crashed. Surprisingly, I slept pretty well.

I had made 11:30 reservations at Serendipity 3 in NYC, famous from the movie with John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale (named “3″ not because it’s the third location but because there were three partners in the founding of it), so my sister, the Kid, and I took the train that would pretty much get us there with plenty of time to spare. Which we did. I feel I need to mention the graffiti we passed about halfway to NY: “WE ARE ALL LOSERS”, repeated in variations over the next mile or so. Thanks for that, whoever you are – I owe you a smack. It was on the train and in Grand Central that I realized how dumb that folder was. Never thought to take a tote bag or anything, so I was in constant fret-mode about losing it, getting it wet, bending it, or discovering that one or all of the pages had dropped out of one of the three open sides … Doofus. At Grand Central Station, gawked at the ceiling again (it never gets old), queued up for a cab like good little law-abiders (unlike that other time), and off to lunch. It’s also always amazing how the cab drivers all, every one, go about ten miles an hour with periodic bursts of about 80. Still, knock on wood, none of the cabs I’ve been in have ever quite hit anyone or anything. We queued up again at the restaurant – which looked tiny, like a lot of places in the city: about a twenty-foot-wide-or-so store front. There was a decent line before they opened (late) at about 11:40 or so, and I was a bit glad of the reservations even though we were at the front.

The space widened out at the back (don’t we all) to a really lovely – charming, even – room hung with dozens of Tiffany lampshades, along with memorabilia of all sorts and kinds and mirrors and a marionette which I believe was Andy Warhol. The menus were huge – in terms of having a lot of options, and also because they looked like open newspapers while being read. The three of us wound up ordering the same thing, which was a “young chicken sandwich” and iced tea … Well. The teas came in goblets that needed a bit of heft to raise, and the sandwiches – sort of open-faced, whether that was intentional or not … The chickens might have been young when butchered, but by the time they hit our table they were a bit old – parts reminded me of Mom’s chicken when it’d been a bit overdone and then reheated. (Sorry Mom.) Still, there was the famous frozen hot chocolate to look forward to, right? Um. Well. It was nice, of course – it was chocolate … but it was basically a chocolate Italian ice, and got watery very quickly. Oh well. They sold the perfume in the little shop in front (as the Doctor said, “I like a little shop!”), so I finally got my hands on it – along with a bag to make sure I didn’t lose that stupid folder with the Jeopardy email anywhere.

We had plenty of time afterward – I think we walked out of there at about 12:45, and that was even with somewhat slow service, and the audition was at 3:00 – so we wandered a little. About a block away I suddenly noticed what we were passing: Dylan’s Candy Bar! I think there was a Food Network thingy on this place a while back: three floors of candy, including a dazzling array of by-the-pound self-serve bins. (As it turns out, their chocolate was almost as disappointing as Serendipity’s, but oh well. C’est la guerre.) It was a bright, fun place, and worth the visit, if not the money spent – still, I found something cute for my graduating niece, and took a cute picture (“Kid! Go stand next to the bunny and I’ll take your picture!” “What bunny?”).

It’s blurry, but I felt silly taking the picture so there’s just the one.

After Dylan’s we pretty much decided to hop in another cab and just go to the Sheraton and figure out what we wanted to do from there. At which point the Kid needed the ladies’ room – that huge iced tea + the frozen hot chocolate – so into the Sheraton we went – and wound up basically just hanging out in the bar for about forty-five minutes. No one really felt like wandering further, and the only shopping nearby that I could see was beyond our means, so … The plan was that when I went off to the testing, the two of them were going to the Met (which a little bit of me envied), and so they did – by way of part of Central Park, in which they stumbled onto the filming of a scene from the remake of Walter Mitty (which worries me – why would you remake a movie – which was based on a book – and change the whole story?): they might wind up in the background! (Wait – that means we have to watch it. Darn.) I wasn’t – quite – hyperventilating; it was more a bouncy let’s-get-this-show-on-the-road nervous than I-need-a-paper-bag-to-breath-into, fortunately.

The Event itself I will post separately – this is the part of less interest to anyone but me, I daresay.

After we were let go, around 5:30, I made my way back to the lobby and found my sister and niece waiting. I gave them a quick recap, and they filled me in on their adventures – they had, as planned, headed for the Met, and went sort of by way of Central Park. They had approached one of the many horse-drawn carriages just out of curiosity – and come to find out a trip from the end of the Park down to the Met would cost about $150. They found a cab.

But not, however, before they almost stumbled into a movie shoot. Apparently the wonderful brains of Hollywood are remaking The Secret Life of Walter Mitty; according to imdb it will star Ben Stiller (which kind of worries me, but then again: Night at the Museum) and Sean Penn is rumored to be co-starring – and, somewhere in the background of a scene shot in Central Park may be two familiar faces. I wouldn’t normally plan to see it – thinking of what they did to Meet John Doe, not that I’ll ever watch that remake either – but now we kind of have to. (What is a movie starring Danny Kaye based on a book by James Thurber, Alex?)

We all kind of looked at each other, sitting there in the Sheraton lobby, and couldn’t quite make up our minds what to do. Home, or …? Finally we just decided to head to Grand Central, and explore the areas we’d never explored before … which, when it came to it, wound up not happening. We were all pooped, and picked a train and got on it. (Come to find out it was a Peak train – and the round trip tickets we held were Off-peak. That never happened before – it was $5 more a ticket, for pete’s sake. Oh well.

Shortly after the train started off, we heard an announcement – presumably to someone who could do something about it – that someone had locked themselves in the bathroom. I hope it wasn’t the bathroom that was right near us, because the three of us, at least, burst out laughing. And then my niece tweeted it. Sorry, person who was already embarrassed …

Two interesting things seen through the train windows: in Harlem, as, I believe, we were just pulling into from the station, I saw a man leaning on his hands against the grate of a closed tobacco shop. He was right below me, motionless, his head down; he was an older man with graying hair, and he had me a little worried. Then, coming from the street so that she emerged from directly below the train, a woman approached him. I thought for a second that she had the same thought that I did – that there was something terribly wrong, and being in a position where she could talk to him she was about to. She went to him and touched his arm, and he jumped a little, and turned, and his face lit up – and he put his arms around her neck and hugged her. Holding hands, they went a few feet away from the store to the street corner, and stopped, and he put his hands up under her hair – the train was coming in now, and the outskirts of the platform were starting to encroach – and he kissed her. And when the platform finally blocked my view he was still kissing her. I felt like a voyeur – well, I was; they had no idea anyone was watching that, though it was on a public street corner – but I was strangely moved by it – it was kind of wonderful.

The other thing? A little ways into Connecticut there was a rainbow. I’ll take that as a sign, thanks.

It was a lot brighter in person…

As we were walking back to the parking garage, across the street from the station, all of a sudden I heard “Hope I see you on Jeopardy!” Wha -?? I turned to see a car pulled up – and my fellow Connecticut tryer-outer whose name I really should remember. I yelled back “You too!” and just marveled at the fact that he – who lived in a completely different town – should have happened to take the exact same train we decided on spontaneously. Fun

I cannot wait to see familiar faces on the show. Can’t wait.

Related articles

• Jeopardy tryouts: been there, done it, and got the pen to prove it (agoldoffish.wordpress.com)
• Alex Trebek Talks Signing Off On ‘Jeopardy!’ (huffingtonpost.com)
• Jeopardy think music wav (stuarthartley3.typepad.com)

 

The War Against Miss Winter – Kathryn Miller Haines

At times, I read in phases. Recently I went through an urban fantasy phase; now and then I’ll be stuck in a gaslight phase and wind up reading all of Anne Perry again. (Or avoiding Anne Perry in search of something new.) For a little while (as long as I could find books to fit it), thanks to James R. Benn, I was in a WWII phase. A Mortal Terror was an excellent murder mystery set in the midst of battle in Italy in 1943; Two O’Clock, Eastern Wartime, by John Dunning, was set in 1944 in New Jersey. When I finished that, after spending a few minutes marveling that there have been so few (if any -?) fantasies set in WWII – what could be more fun to write than a pack of werewolves on the front lines, or a wizard supporting the resistance? – and in fact that I have so little fiction at all set during WWII, I remembered receiving The War Against Miss Winter. I’m fairly certain this was featured on the Stop You’re Killing Me site, and that on having a credit available on paperbackswap I took a chance on it based on the SYKM review. 1943′s WWII homefront, theatre, murder – sounded good.

It wasn’t good. It was very good. It was so much more fun than I expected. I, in case I haven’t been clear, really enjoyed it.

It took a minute. I had my doubts about an aspiring actress working as the secretary in a private eye’s office – that strays into the world of the ludicrous – but by the time she found her boss, Sam McCain, hanged in his office I was hooked. The world-building, or world-recreation, feels thorough and genuine: Rosie’s world is one very much at war, and the effects of that are everywhere. There has to have been a tremendous amount of painstaking research behind this – it shows, in every good way. The setting is everything I could have wanted – the Home Front of the War is utilized to the fullest.

Rosie’s best friend Jayne reminded me of Stacy from Drop Dead Diva – all the appearance of being the beautiful dumb blonde and very little of the reality. Jayne broke my heart, made me scared for her, and was generally a terrific friend and terrific character. Rosie herself is flawed, and knows it; she’s tough, as a girl has to be chasing a dream in New York in any era – but maybe a little too tough. She’s not willing to let anything get through to her, and that takes in the good as well as the bad. The book is told in the first-person, and I don’t think the line Rosie walks is easy to pull off in that voice – it’s great work.

I kept expecting each of the men in the story to sweep Rosie off her feet and take her mind off Jack, the actor she had been seeing who abruptly went off to war, who left without saying goodbye. My money was on Al the bodyguard; I think most stories would have painted him as the initial impression he gives – a mob thug – and left the portrait there, with no depth at all. But he’s kind of awesome too. In fact, nobody is simply what he (or she) first appears; there are first impressions, then second impressions, then the learned reality, and always room for surprises. Kathryn Miller Haines plays clichés like cheap violins (to coin a cliché). Oh, well, there’s the girl who appears to be a bitch and really is; and that’s wonderful too, because I kept expecting it to take a conventional turn and reveal her to have a heart of gold. Nope: she’s a bitch. With some reasons, and occasional softer moments, but the latter are usually a trap: she’s still a bitch.

The plot didn’t go as might have been expected either. The mystery tangles around the mob and the theatre and extramarital affairs, and Rosie works her way through it while understudying in a true stinker of an avant-garde show. She never quite pushes the boundaries of what is believable of a young woman of her place and time and abilities – and she has a lot of help along the way. It’s a lovely book, and a solid, hopeful start to a series.