THE GOOD LIFE
CU LT U R E
I Lost On Jeopardy!
This Charlottean recollects his appearance on the beloved game show 21 years ago
IT IS A MONDAY MORNING in early 2000, and I am wearing my best suit, peering into the middle distance, and trying to ignore a jaunty piece of music written by Merv Griffin. I am playing in the Final Jeopardy round of Jeopardy!—and I don’t know the answer. (Or, if you prefer, the question.) I read the clue again: “Venetians called him ‘Il Milione,’ man of the million lies.” A politician, maybe? I riffle through the index cards of my mind: Mussolini? Machiavelli? Neither seem right. I know I’m playing a game, but I have only 30 seconds to come up with the right answer, and at this moment, nothing has ever seemed more important. Growing up, I was a bookworm—but I loved to miss school, because that meant a whole morning of game shows. As a kid, it seemed natural that most rewarded enthusiasm as much as intellectual ability. Many of my favorites went off the air as the years went by (R.I.P., The Joker’s Wild, with the category All Those Ologies), but Jeopardy! came back from the dead in 1984 and took over the world, like a
28
CHARLOTTEMAGAZINE.COM // JUNE 2021
zombie movie where the walking dead ask, “What are brains?” Maybe it was the rigorous nature of the contest, with no gimmick beyond phrasing your answer in the form of a question. Maybe it was the unflappable presence of the late, great host Alex Trebek. Or maybe it was that damn theme music (called “Think!,” it turns out). But when I turned 30 and made a list of life goals, my top two unfulfilled dreams were visiting Australia and appearing on Jeopardy! So on a business trip to Los Angeles, I delayed my flight home so I could try out for the show. Auditions, to my surprise, took place in the Jeopardy! studio in Culver City: We sat in the audience’s seats and were given ballpoint pens emblazoned with the show’s logo. The crowd was culled with a written test: 50 mediumhard trivia questions. If you got at least 35 right, as roughly 12 out of 100 aspirants did that day, you were invited to stick around. Everyone else? The producers encouraged them to tell their friends that they missed the cutoff by exactly one question.
Those of us who stayed behind played a few sample rounds of trivia, but the producers didn’t care who won: They were judging us on camera-readiness and our ability to follow instructions. I decided that my competition, mostly men, fell into three categories. Some were definitely out: The guy who showed up in denim cutoff shorts and kept mumbling into his shoulder was treated politely but wasn’t going to end up on national TV. The two beautiful, confident brunette women, however, were definitely in. I pegged myself toward the top of the middle group: I had a good shot but not a guarantee. The producers sent us home with our ballpoint pens and told us that if we didn’t hear from them in 12 months, we could audition again. For the next year, I videotaped every episode of Jeopardy!, then watched it with a remote control and “buzzed in” by hitting the pause button. I learned about the gaps in my knowledge (geography, Canadian history) and tried to fill them in with a spackle of facts and flash cards. But as week after week passed, I assumed
LOGAN CYRUS
BY GAVIN EDWARDS
