Castrodale: Fear & loathing in the form of a question … my brief reign as Jeopardy! champion

Maybe it was because I stopped my shopping cart before it crashed into a stranger’s Miata. Maybe it was because I bought ninety pounds of Butter Lite popcorn from an undersized Boy Scout. Maybe it was the courtesy flush. As the commercial break began, I stood behind an electronic podium wondering what I’d ever done to deserve this, to earn “Sports & The Media” as my Final Jeopardy category.
“Oh, Jelisa’s smiling now,” Alex Trebek told the audience before the break. “She’s happy.” And I was, especially after reading the answer: “On February 8, 2010, the headline in a major newspaper in this city read ‘Amen! After 43 Years, Our Prayers Are Answered.’” I carefully printed “What is New Orleans?” assuming that Roger Craig, the six-time superchampion to my right, was writing those same four words. He wasn’t.
That episode was taped on the last Wednesday in July, but my bid to stand in the Sony Pictures Studio actually started with Jeopardy‘s online contestant test at the end of January.

It was another unseasonably cold night and, rather than drag my dog through the gathering darkness or see how many Teddy Grahams I could fit in my mouth, I sat at my kitchen counter trying to answer questions about things that I’d forgotten I’d forgotten. After guessing that Larry King had been the first man born in America and that Bieber Fever was the seventh plague of Egypt, I shrugged it off, grabbing a half-empty box of bear-shaped cookies and resuming my regularly-scheduled life.
Two months later, I had a form email in my inbox telling me that — somehow — I’d passed the test and was invited for an in-person audition. The morning after my birthday, I wriggled into my most responsible-looking outfit — two of the few items I own that aren’t made of Sweatpant — and drove to Raleigh, North Carolina to join the other would-be Jeopardizers in an outdated-looking conference room in a Conference USA-caliber hotel chain.
The contestant coordinators, a pair of unfailingly upbeat Jeopardy employees, told us that of the several thousand people they would interview during the summer, only 450 would be selected to potentially humiliate themselves on national television. After another fifty question test, an interview and a stripped-down version of the game, I left the audition with a Jeopardy logo pen and irrationally high hopes.
I was in the hamster-scented back corner of Walmart, wading through a river of spilled kibble in the pet section when they called to tell me I’d been selected for the show, making me possibly the only contestant to receive the news while holding a Howard the Duck DVD, a bag of Snausages and an earwax removal kit.
Beginning the next morning, I studied. Every day, I flipped the thin pages of the World Almanac and fell asleep facedown in an oversized atlas, crushing a number of Caribbean nations with my forehead. I spent most waking hours frantically trying to recover all of the important information that my brain had overwritten with Red Sox stats and Ghostbusters quotes or that I’d completely obliterated with Solo cups filled with bottom-shelf booze. Presidents. World capitals. Books of the Bible. State parks. The lesser-known Baldwin brothers.
My brain was dangerously full by the time my boyfriend and I boarded the flight to Los Angeles and we both spent those four hours terrified that my head would explode somewhere over the Central Time zone, showering the middle passengers of the plane with skull fragments, Andrew Jackson facts, and the lyrics to West Virginia’s state song.
Jeopardy only films on two days, working through a week of shows — five episodes — every Tuesday and Wednesday. The next morning — Season 27′s first day of taping — my profusely sweating upper lip and I joined eleven strangers in the green room, each of us secretly hoping we’d be 1/3 of the premiere episode. The contestant coordinators reviewed some basic game strategy, read the fine print of the release forms, and gave us some other information I ignored while eating my weight in complimentary pastries.
Shortly after I developed adult-onset diabetes, we had an hour of dress rehearsal before the studio audience took their seats and a windbreaker-wearing Johnny Gilbert boomed “This … is …. Jeopardy!“. The first contestants were last season’s final champion Meg Miller and her two randomly-selected challengers: Scott Wells, a medievalist and opera fan who had to be hoping for a category about loneliness, and an immediately likable grad student named Roger Craig.
The soft-spoken Craig dominated the game, answering in the form of a question twenty-eight times. He wagered $12,400 — his entire total — on one Daily Double, making Canadian hero Alex Trebek’s maple-shaped heart skip several beats. Craig walked offstage as the season’s first winner, quickly swapping ties and settling behind the far-right Champion’s podium. He won his second game in historic fashion, banking $77,000 and breaking the one-day earnings record. Then he won another. And another. And another, sending a week’s worth of opponents home with nothing but his footprint on their ass and a one-sentence mention in their hometown papers.
My contestant number hadn’t been drawn, which meant that I had to spend the next day at the studio too, earning another trip through the metal detector and another twenty minutes in the makeup chair. I slumped out the door, unsure whether I even wanted to go back. Roger was unbelievable, transforming himself from harmless to terrifying faster than anything since Gizmo the Mogwai ate a plate of chicken legs after midnight.
After a largely sleepless night spent listening to the asthmatic wheeze of the hotel air conditioner, it was back to the Sony lot for an almost word-for-word rerun of the day before, for the Groundhog Day of game show tapings. Wednesday’s first episode went by without me, as I sat in the audience picking imaginary threads off my sweater and wondering if I’d have time after my inevitable loss to look for the Lucite box where Alex Trebek stores his former mustache.
“Jelisa,” one of the contestant coordinators whispered as Roger was out-braining a library assistant and a lawyer. “You’re on next.”
That’s just about the last thing I remember. I know I gave a wide-eyed, rabid-looking smile into the camera as Johnny Gilbert mentioned my hyphenated hometown. I did write my own name at the podium, double-checking the shaky white letters to make sure I hadn’t left a crucial vowel backstage. But after that? The game is a blur of blended sounds and bright colors, kind of like a Grateful Dead show without the awkwardly swaying white people.
It took five clues before I rang in, blurting out “WHAT ARE THE LACHRYMAL DUCTS?”, an eye-part I know I learned from an episode of House. After what felt like two blinks later, the first round was over and — inexplicably — I was in the lead and — unsurprisingly — on the verge of soiling myself. Whatever success I’d had after shouting “Who is Zac Ephron?” was short-lived. Roger launched himself ahead after tearing through a category about Ur, a civilization I’d never heard of, possibly because my knowledge of ancient history is limited to what I learned from the Indiana Jones trilogy.
After benefiting from my knowledge of pillows (no, really), Roger was only ahead by $2,300 when the time ran out. I braced myself for a Final Jeopardy category that I’d know nothing about, something like “People Who Didn’t Fail Freshman Philosophy”, “Books You Can’t Buy at An Exxon Station” or “Health Insurance”. Instead, Alex fired his index finger at the game board and revealed …”Sports & the Media” and I felt like Fate had not only kissed me on the mouth, but had slipped me a little tongue, too.
Regardless, I believed that the best I could hope for was a second place finish and the knowledge that, other than wearing a shade of beige that made me look like part of an IHOP pancake platter, I’d have no regrets. I knew that Roger — and Matt, the contestant standing between us — both would’ve watched the Super Bowl, spending that Sunday night in February counting the number of beer commercials and consuming several years’ worth of sodium.
Matt’s response was revealed first, a tentatively written “What is Miami?”. That didn’t have time to register before Alex moved to my own answer. “Jelisa came up with ‘What is New Orleans?’”, he said. “Yes, the Saints’ Super Bowl victory.” I’d wagered everything but a dollar — $19,699 — which meant I stood onscreen beaming above a five-figure dollar amount that was bigger than what I’d earned during the last year of my most miserable office job.
“Over to Roger Craig,” Alex said. “We need a correct response, obviously.” But Roger had written “What is Chicago?”. He was wrong and, at the moment those words filled the screen, I audibly gasped, followed by the echo of my jaw smacking against the studio floor. Tears nibbled at the corners of my eyes; What are ‘my damn lachrymal ducts?’ This couldn’t have happened. I didn’t know whether to laugh, to throw up, or to lose consciousness.

As the closing credits scrolled across our faces, I joined Roger, Matt and Alex at the center of the stage, still unsteady, still unsure what had happened. We walked toward the green room and Roger gave me a rib-crushing hug and his sincere congratulations, because he’s both an extraordinary player and an even better person. After thanking him, I had barely enough time for the makeup artist to untangle my eyelashes, to change clothes and swing through the unisex bathroom before being hustled back onstage.
In his book Prisoner of Trebekistan, eight-time champion Bob Harris said that after his first win, he felt like he’d just come out of surgery. That’s an accurate analogy, assuming that you’d just had your central nervous system removed. My hands were shaking so hard when I started writing at my name on the Champion’s podium that I false started three times before I made it past “J-E”.
The short story on my second game is that I lost. The other two contestants — Russ Porter and Destiny Lilly — were mind-blowingly fast with the buzzers and the categories didn’t exactly overlap with the contents of my brain, since the only “Famous Poet” I’m familiar with frequently uses phrase like “There once was a man from Enis”. Final Jeopardy’s answer was “What is tartan?”, a response that I couldn’t have coaxed out of my head if the producers had given me a T, an A and an R.
My reign as champion lasted roughly thirty-five minutes. I was a one termer, a Jimmy Carter, a George H.W. Bush. As I walked out the door into the blindingly bright afternoon sun, someone who had been in the audience asked what I would do with my prize money. “I’m buying a Saints hat,” I said, shoving a stack of post-show paperwork into my backpack. “And maybe another ninety pounds of Boy Scout popcorn.”
***
Jelisa Castrodale is a writer and comedian who has learned a lot about life by making a mess of her own. She chronicles her failures at The Typing Makes Me Sound Busy, and twitters while she waits at stoplights. Castrodale was featured in the book Twitter Wit and was named one of Mashable’s 10 Funniest Twitterers. Contact her at jacastrodale@gmail.com.
Also by Jelisa Castrodale …