Jeopardy, part 2

For more info, see yesterday's post.

When we left, um, me, I'd just gotten a phone call to film a Jeopardy episode. Awesome. John, my best friend Wendy (she of the swimming posts), and I booked tickets out to LA, then I had to get to studying. See, a lot of people think that, if ou're going to be on Jeopardy, you get some kind of list of potential topics. Not so! I tried to think of what I know the least about -- geography, presidential cabinets, sitcoms, and the academy awards, more or less. I made absurdly elaborate flash cards (check out Truman!), which I lugged about with me for weeks on end but hardly actually looked at. (Life advice if you want to study geography, do not waste your time making a flash card for every country in the world, because that is an insane waste of time and you will spend days on end on it and still stall out around San Marino or so. Not that I'd know from personal experience or anything.)

I also started actually watching Jeopardy. Now, this is kind of embarrassing, but I have never been a huge Jeopardy watcher. I know a lot of big fans, but it's not a part of my day-to-day schedule. Clearly, this wasn't going to help me. On the advice of Arthur Phillips (friend of my dad's, Jeopardy champ, and author of "The Egyptologist," one of my favorite books), I watched absolutely religiously. John kept score (enormously strictly -- deducting points when I didn't answer in the form of a question, all that), and things improved dramatically and quickly. When I first started playing at home (in early November), I was scoring about $18,000 per night (ignoring betting). By January, I was reliably hitting $25,000 or so, not actually because I got smarter but because I learned to quit guessing. I stopped prefacing answers with "I'm gonna say . . . ," and, most of all, I kept my big mouth shut when I had no idea. (Apparently, I made the same stupid faces I wound up making on the show, but that's much more my day-to-day life than anything else!)

By the time we got to LA, I was more dreading my taping than anything else. We stayed in the Jeopardy-recommended hotel, and I entertained myself in the rainy LA weather (it rains in LA? who knew?) by trying to guess which other hotel guests were Jeopardy contestants. I was wrong most of the time, but figured it out the morning of the taping. I took the bus over to the Sony studios with a dozen or so other future Jeopardy players, and I remember talking a lot with Nancy from Las Vegas (who was on the day before me) and Sarah from Chicago (who'll be on on Friday). I brought clothes for three days, since they tape five shows per day, but I was secretly betting on being out in one. No one who's ever met me would say I'm over the top in the self-esteem department. (Alternately, I'm realistic.)

Now. When we finally reached the studio and got set up, things got more fun. There was paperwork, sure, but it was augmented by donuts (I had several), smoothies (I had one), and fruit (which I ignored, more or less, in favor of donuts and smoothies). Maggie reappeared, which delighted me, and she and the other casting staff went over our stories. (I'd submitted six or so potential anecdotes, which they'd narrowed down to three -- this site, my time in college working on the steamboat at Mystic Seaport, and a Jeopardy-related story about the first time I met my future father-in-law. We had to rehearse delivering whatever of our stories the casting crew had liked, and then they chose one or two to pass along to Alex.

(Makeup happened around this time, too. Somehow, I managed to be the last through the makeup area, and I have absolutely no idea what they did to me. It was like a magical, movie-style transformation montage. The makeup artist told me that it was just emphasizing good areas and minimizing bad areas and that even a trained monkey could do it, but this is totally unacceptable self-deprecation. So there.)

Post-makeup, we had a few minutes to try out the buzzers and generally get a feel for the set. First things first. See, I have solid spatial perception, but the stage was totally not oriented the way it felt like it should be. I sort of imagined the audience being more behind Alex than they were, and the contestants standing at an oblique angle to the audience. Not so! This, oddly, threw me more than anything else the entire time. Though I also had some big-time problems with the buzzer. I didn't play video games as a child and it showed, though Dave from Mississippi was a magical, magical buzzer god. I think that, in the entire buzzer-practice round, I managed to ring in once, then immediately forget the correct answer. I have a feeling that my future competitors saw me as an easy pushover, and I spent the rest of the morning praying not to go up against Dave.

Finally, it was time for the audience to come in. Maggie re-emerged and went over basic rules. We were allowed to sit near our families, but not among them, and we weren't allowed to make eye contact or communicate in any way. I tried to follow this one, but let me tell you, it's hard. It's like being told not to think of an elephant. Or not to think of Alex Trebek. Exactly. (This was even harder because John and Wendy arrived with my high school buddy Jordan, who is a Big Deal out in LA, and whom I hadn't seen for something like 10 years. Plus, they were going to meet each other at the studio, sight-unseen. I desperately wanted to know that they'd found each other, which they somehow had with almost no trouble. Go my friends!) At some point during the morning, Brandon from Augusta (who would later beat me!) and I had a long discussion of Final Jeopardy betting strategies, which was probably a bad move on my part. Oops. I need to be a tougher competitor. (Please note! Important! I am not not not saying Brandon cheated, or that I gave away my strategy! My winning or losing was 100% my own fault, and I own it entirely.)

I played in the fourth game of the day, after a morning of watching three games and a lunch in the studio commissary. Other people on the show maintain that we ate at a table next to Adam Sandler, but I have no way of confirming this because I wouldn't recognize the man if he were to sit down next to me and say "hi Emily. I'm Adam Sandler." Actually, that might do it. Regardless. (You are probably, by now, getting the sense that my Jeopardy experience was heavily food-based. This is true.)

After lunch, it was my game. Despite everything I'd hoped for, I was up against Dave from Mississippi, the magical buzzer-hero, and Brandon from Augusta. The production crew wired us up with microphones (I kept trying to walk away with mine, which resulted in awkward pulling on the front of my sweater) and used a system of risers behind the podiums (podia?) to make us all roughly the same height -- in real life, I'm considerably shorter than Dave. Johnny Gilbert, the classic Jeopardy announcer, read our names, and we were off!

The first round was a complete fever dream for me -- I was pretty satisfied with the botany and time zone categories, though the army base and baseball categories left me bewildered. Above all, though, I was still having buzzer problems. (If you see the episode, you'll see me unknowingly doing that awful thing contestants do when they shake their hands as if to demonstrate to the world "see? see? I'm totally buzzing right now." I will never again judge someone for that.)

The break between single and double jeopardy felt like it took about a second and a half, but double Jeopardy was enormously better. I decided that I had to stop watching the scoreboard, and after a few questions had gone by I suddenly got the hang of buzzing in. I had some kind of weird, two-handed-two-thumbed buzzing strategy that looks superungainly on tv, but it worked surprisingly well. Only when I got my first Daily Double (a question about Robert Louis Stevenson, the answer to which I knew thanks to junior high school English) did I realize that I had never thought at all about betting strategies. I drew a number at least a thousand above the point value of the question and hoped for the best. Success! (I was actually feeling really good about the South Seas literature category, because there were questions about Mutiny on the Bounty and Typee, both of which I love.)

I got another Daily Double later in the same round. I'm bewildered by the idea, referenced elsewhere on the net, of "hunting" for a DD -- I sort of thought they were randomly assigned, and I'm not sure how one might hunt for something randomly placed. Regardless. This one was in a category about fashion, which made me draw in my breath a little bit. Only since moving to NY, and therefore no longer having a car, have I stopped buying most of my clothes at Target, and I'm still pretty much dressed via H&M and Old Navy. (Maybe I'm having a little bit of a hard time getting the hang of adult costuming . . . .) Regardless, the question had something to do with Armani and fashion shows, and it was a nightmarish moment -- I'd just bet $3000 on something and, all of a sudden, out of my mouth, comes "you think I should know that?" Oh God. On national television. Mortification ensued, while I was also thinking "Rome? Venice? Siena? Florence? Is Tuscany a city? Tuscany is probably not a city. Really? Tuscany? Sicily isn't a city either." And then, oh you will not believe me, I thought about going to the mall in high school and seeing some semi-fashionable store with a big poster in its window listing "New York. Paris. Milan." Milan! Thank heavens.

The big finale was, of course, Final Jeopardy. I saw the category: the animal kingdom. I am a science teacher with a master's in oceanography. This is a piece of cake! Plus, I'd gotten all the other FJ's correct that day, which was encouraging. Only at the betting did I actually look at the scores -- holy crap. I just won on Jeopardy.

Well, almost.

I bet so that, if Brandon had bet every dollar he had, I'd've won by $1. Was this a good idea? I'm still not sure. In my head, I think I'd do the same thing again. After all, I figured there were 4 possible outcomes: we both got it right, I got it right and he got it wrong, I got it wrong and he got it right, and we both got it wrong. In either of the first two situations, my sickeningly enormous (my first grad assistantship paid only marginally more than my FJ bet!) would give me the win. In the third situation, I'd be pretty much guaranteed a loss, but the fourth situation was a wildcard. Here's the motive: I decided that the only thing I could control was what I got right. By betting the way I did, I had a lock on the win as long as I answered the question correctly -- I would only lose under my own power. Ultimately, things backfired, and I lost because we both got it wrong and he bet way, way less than I did, but still, I can only express so much regret. Sure, if I'd bet a big fat 0 I'd be a Jeopardy champion right now, but in the moment, there was no way to know it. I took an aggressive route, but I played to win it, not to let someone else make that choice for me.

Right afterwards, I was pretty bummed -- I saw Dave later in the hotel, though, and he had great words of advice for me: "Why are you so upset? I was just on Jeopardy, so how bad can it be?" True words, sir.

One final thought: I've been so grateful to my family (who has to be nice to me) and my friends (who are my friends because they're so nice). It's part of the social contract, I guess -- if your cousin or coworker or whatever is on a national TV show, you have to call them brilliant and good-looking and say they were totally robbed in their loss. Thanks, guys. You're awesome.

Other things online have been kind of weird, though. Some sites (the official Jeopardy boards at Sony) were pleasantly serious-minded, and I've been really enjoying reading them. Others, though (I'm looking at you, Television Without Pity!) are pretty harsh -- it's making me a little self-conscious. (This is probably a good reminder that the anonymity of the internet can bite me in the butt. That and that I should never, ever make nasty comments about people on non-fictional TV shows again.) There, and via the hilarious, hilarious twitter search of Jeopardy-related posts from last night, I've learned that a lot of people thought I came off cocky, or even that my hemming and hawing during my second DD was meant to taunt my opponents (what kind of evil genius do they thing I am?) and that I was totally trying to get Alex Trebek to make out with me or something. (Do people say this about male contestants who make jokes, too? If not, which I think is probably the case, this seems both kind of sexist and also a kind of heteronormative.) Also, reactions to me seemed very split along gender lines, which I feel a little weird about, too. That's a thought for another day, though, I reckon.