Chapter 12: A Digression, Wherein Our Hero Auditions for Jeopardy and the Essential Goodness of the Universe is Revealed

Although I am a lifelong New Yorker, I'd never set foot in the Waldorf Astoria until last week, when I arrived there in my Sunday best for the regional tryouts for Jeopardy. People had been telling me for years that I really would do well on the show, and I was never sure whether it was a compliment or simply evidence of my not having gotten out of the house enough. But I had done well on the first-ever Jeopardy online test, and had been invited to compete here under the same roof where presidents and four-star generals party. Naturally, the main ballrooms were reserved for the likes of the Pincus-Warburg meeting and the Sotheby's confab, where people were strolling the halls with swag bags from Tiffany's. After several inquiries, I determined that the tryouts were all the way in the back of the hotel, in the Marco Polo room, aptly named given the amount of exploration entailed in finding it. The room was right across the hall from Kenneth's Hair Salon, and in the fifteen minutes I waited outside for the games to begin, I became quite adept at guessing whether the people approaching my position were heading for brain teasing or hair teasing. Finally the doors opened just after noon, and I entered, bearing lightly the collective hopes and dreams of my loved ones and colleagues.

Once inside, the potential contestants sized each other up. And there were some real surprises. Most noticeable was that nearly two thirds of the hopefuls were women (and still are, I bet), which is in itself unusual only in that on the show, it seems as though perhaps only a third of the contestants are of the distaff side. My guess is that if you're an intelligent and ambitious woman from Peoria, your vocational and social options might be somewhat limited. I had never realized that one of the reasons that I love my city so much is that all the bright women come here! Also, the nerd quotient was quite a bit lower than I had expected; no cheese doodle stains on the shirt, no glassy eyes from too many hours playing Grand Theft Auto, no Star Trek com pins. Just teachers, lawyers, a couple of doctors, social workers, people from the metro area and from as far away as Toronto. What brought us there was a love of knowledge qua knowledge, the quaint notion that we should want to know things simply for the sake of knowing them. This is an age when everything, knowledge most of all, is commodified or judged strictly by its value in the marketplace, and one might argue that the only reason we were there was to turn our nickel knowledge into cold hard cash. But it was clear after a few minutes that the money was not the motivating factor; we could have tried out for Deal or No Deal or Millionaire, and made a lot more money for being a lot dumber. My fellow potential contestants are the folks who get annoyed when they don't know something, who carry around notebooks so they can jot down words they don't know from articles they read, who have managed to never stop being students even as they've made their successful way in the world. Nice to know they're still out there, isn't it?

As for the process, it was both fun and frustrating. Merv's minions led us through the forms and releases, giving us Jeopardy pens that were shaped like the actual buzzers on the show so we might practice. They then took Polaroids of us, and laughed when I made a Memento joke. Then it was a videotape greeting from The Man himself--no, he was not there, which happily prevented me from doing my imitation of Darrell Hammond doing his imitation of Sean Connery ("The day is mine, Trebek."). After the expected run of questions about what Alex is really like, we were given another 50-question written test, with 8 seconds to answer each question. I'd love to tell you what was on the exam, but they'd have to liquidate me as a precaution if I did. Then the simulated game, to test what was euphemistically described as our "buzzer skills." Finally, a couple of witty-badinage questions of the sort one might volley around with The Man if one were actually to appear on the show. The one thing they asked all of us was what we might do with any serious sums of money we might win on the show. Almost everyone described how they would use the money to travel, although a disconcerting number of people expressed an interest in seeing New Zealand after having watched Xena: Warrior Princess and/or Lord of the Rings.

The end was something of an anti-climax, in that no one was "eliminated" from the process. We were all told that we would be kept in their files for a year, and that they might call us at any point--or not. Their decision will be based on our scores, how potentially telegenic we were and many intangible and ineffable factors. And as we walked out of the hotel into midday sun and traffic, I wondered to myself if the time and energy I'd spent amassing this knowledge was wasted. After all, in the age of Google and Ask Jeeves, isn't being able to name all the British monarchs or Super Bowl winners or state birds a bit redundant, to put it charitably? On the bus home, I comforted myself with the thought that it's kind of like Pascal's Wager. If you live the life of the generalist and the perpetual student, the rewards may come in whatever manifestation they might. And if they don't, well, you've made the journey a lot more interesting anyway. And now I sit by the phone, waiting for Alex to call, comfortable with the notion that the key to happiness might not necessarily lie in any of Howie's 26 briefcases.