Fulfilling (Yet Another) Childhood Dream

continued...

You have to wonder why they were waiting so long to put me on. This was February 2014--I had gotten the letter while still a student at USC, April 2013. Ten whole months had passed between getting the letter and my tape date.

I took one look at the theme week and my jaw dropped.

"The theme for the first five shows is WHEEL 6000."

You have to wonder. I don't know why they wanted me, of all people, for their commemorative 6000th, but far be it from me to complain!

So I'm scrambling to put together wardrobe selections, asking friends still at USC if I could crash at their place for the night before, and getting a few things together before the big day.

There were, however, a couple of good-luck charms I wasn't about to leave home without (pictures to come later)...

The first was a Shinkendo tenugui (a thin Japanese hand towel--there's one hell of a puzzle if I ever saw one). Shinkendo is the sword style I've been studying for the past two years or so, and it's become more than just a hobby to me; it's become a way of life, as cliché as that sounds. I had just received my first junior instructor's license a few months before, and I had heard of a tradition the main dojo has (had?), where you take a picture of yourself holding up the tenugui in front of a famous landmark that you happen to visit. I had actually visited the dojo the day before I was to tape, where--coincidentally--they happened to be holding test-cutting then. Not wanting to over-exert my spinning arm the day before, I took pictures of the cutting instead.

The other charm--I guess that's charmS (don't drop the S!)--were two add-on wedges (Surprise and Jackpot) to my wheel model my grandfather made for me all those years ago. My grandfather and I were very close, right up until he passed away in 2004. He was in the audience when I played Jeopardy!, and knowing that my grandmother--who was also present for Jeopardy!--was going to be in the audience for Wheel, I saw this as my way of taking him with me. Kinda eerily fitting that the two wedges I took with me were always on the wheel whenever I brought it out to play and represent elements the show no longer uses...

Of course, it's raining the night before, to the point where, in my haste to make it back indoors before I get very wet, I run to the front door of my friend's residence hall...only to slip and take an epic fall right in front of the door. Hopefully I didn't mess up my spinning arm too badly.

Anyway, tape day. I set my alarm for 6 am, plan to leave my friend's place at 6:30, hope that traffic isn't obnoxious that early (but it usually is), and get to Sony around 7:30 to make my 7:45 call time. You know what they say: if you're early, you're on time, and if you're on time, you're late.

I wound up waking up at 5:30, and leaving at 6:15.

Even better: I don't take the freeway at all, only surface roads, and end up where I need to be...at 6:45 AM.

Great! Now how do I kill the next hour before I need to be in?

(stomach rumbles)

Well, that's how. And hey, how convenient, there's a Starbucks just down the street! I pop in for a tea and a croissant--I don't like doing any show on a full stomach, and I'm not sure how caffeine is going to affect me before a big show like this. (I learned from the kid in my Jeopardy! taping group who downed eight cans of Sprite in the green room--I wish that were an exaggeration.)

I see someone else in the Starbucks carrying a FedEx envelope similar to the one I remember getting shortly before I came back to LA. Was she a contestant? I dunno, it's still too early in the morning to ask questions. And I can feel the nerves begin to set in. My croissant, long finished, probably digested in double time as I sat sipping my hot tea that had gotten way too strong.

7:25 AM.

Screw it, I'm going in. I can't sit here waiting anymore.

to be continued...

...continued...

(Josh note: In my attempts at irreverent, self-effacing humor throughout this piece, there are a couple of instances of less-than-socially-acceptable language. If you're offended by such words...plug your ears, close your eyes, go "lalalalalalalalalala" until I'm finished, and carry on.)

I was a little confused after I had parked my car and found my way to the waiting area. Sony has two entrances that both Wheel and Jeopardy! use, one on Motor and the other on Overland. They told me to use the entrance on Motor (the Overland entrance is for audience members), but I guess I had the Overland parking structure in my head when I went down. Since my appearance on Jeopardy!, I had been in the Jeopardy! audience twice and the Wheel audience once, so I guess you could say I had gotten used to using the Overland entrance. Which explains why I was so confused when I found my way to the reception gate...until I saw something very yellow waiting nearby.

Yep, the Wheelmobile. I'm in the right place, all right.

Jackie comes walking up a few minutes later, looking as though she had just parked her car.

That's when you know you're too early to be considered socially acceptable--you beat the producers there.

Anyway, the lady I saw in the Starbucks earlier walks up not long after that. Summer, as I later learned, was also going to be a contestant, and though I didn't show it, I thought to myself: "Hmmmmmmm."

The last time I casually ran into someone without knowing if they were going to be a contestant, we both got our asses handed to ourselves by the third player. (Well, more like he got whipped, I beat myself.) But that was 10 years ago, and if I know my skill as a Wheel player at all, I'm going to change that.

There's a definite awkwardness in meeting your fellow contestants for the first time. On the one hand, you're relieved (especially this early in the morning) to not be the only one to show up, and to have the green room all to yourself so that you can basically internalize everything and let it all go to your head. On the other hand, there's that other part of you that wants to say, "Hi, it's nice to meet you, but I'm totally going to kick your ass today."

Still awkward is the point where you're in the green room filling out paperwork and you don't feel like striking up polite conversation yet. It's still early, can you blame me?

Anyway, to save you all the explanations that I was more or less tuning out because a) I'd been through the spiels twice before and b) I know the game and all its intricacies like the back of my hand, as they say on a lot of classic game shows..."let's meet the contestants!"

I later found out that of the 20 of us in the room that day, four of us--myself included--had been on The Price is Right ("There's always at least one," says the compliance official), a few had been on local dating shows, one guy had won $100,000 on Millionaire a couple of years ago (and had walked on a $250,000 question to which he ultimately had the right answer), and then there's me, the lone Jeopardy! veteran. That alone simultaneously made me the coolest and the most hated person in the room; I definitely got some gasps as soon as the word "Jeopardy!" came out of my mouth, and some leery stares from the ones who weren't gasping. Perhaps the most amazing thing that came out of this was one of the Joannes, who claimed she remembered me from my first-run appearance some 10 years ago. Unless she remembered some geeky Asian kid with glasses, braces, and a voice that's about two octaves higher than it is now, I took it with a grain of salt. Here's the pic below--you can compare it to my forum avatar and can judge from there. Do I look ANYTHING like I did 10 years ago?


"I never miss an episode," she claimed later. Joanne was also on the Price is Right shortly before Bob Barker retired--I think she may have been the one who said she played Lucky $even. (There were two others who had also been on, I couldn't keep 'em all straight.)

In the group we discover there are, as I mentioned before, two Joannes, and yet another Josh (he of "Millionaire" success). There's a guy named Sterling who said (rather tongue-in-cheek), "Aw man, I don't wanna play against Jeopardy-man back there!" right before we drew for our shows. I spoke with two other gentlemen in the back whose names fail me now, but once I see their names in the recap I'm sure I'll remember. One of them had gotten the audition, the letter, and the Call in the span of about six weeks, give or take. (It may not have actually been six weeks--anything shorter than my 10 months is short to me, but I do remember his wait being exceptionally short.)

Then there was another kid, Trent, who looked maybe a little younger than me, and his mother was also in tow (he had special accommodations made; I don't know why exactly other than what Gary mentioned as "vision problems"--his show will speak for itself when it airs, I suppose). As much as the other players didn't talk to him much, he seemed to know the game and Wheel's history really well. I spoke to him a little bit, and I think he was just really shy. But you could tell he was just really, really excited to be there, and had been a fan of the show for years.

I guess that's the one thing I regret about this whole thing--I didn't spend the night in the hotel with the other contestants, so I could get to know them better. In the green room, while I will agree that there's a lot of time before the shows actually start taping, they take up a lot of that time rotating you in and out of the makeup chair, explaining the rules, filling out paperwork, and so forth. If any of you are out there and stumble upon this, hit me up.

The moment we had all been waiting for had finally arrived: stepping onto the stage for the first time. And with it comes spinning the wheel for the first time! Trent had already taken his spot at the yellow podium--he needed some extra time going up and down the steps to the wheel and some extra time to get oriented. Because of the aforementioned vision issues he had, they had rolled another monitor near the base of the wheel to serve as his used letter board.

I finally get my turn at the wheel, and just standing up there feels great. It's a feeling of power, to be sure. And as strange as this is for me to say, after a couple of spins, it felt good. Just one spin probably released enough endorphins to keep me on a high for the rest of the day. As I would soon find out, it's almost like you become addicted to spinning the wheel. Hell, I'm sitting here two weeks later and I'm still having withdrawals.

It felt so good to the point where I didn't even notice my finger was bleeding until after I stepped down. On one of my practice spins, I slipped off the spoke as I was pushing the wheel forward and must have nicked my finger on another spoke. (And--irony of ironies--slipping on the wheel caused me to land on Express. Of course.) Though they were kind enough to bandage my poor finger before long, Gary joked that they'd have to replace me with a standby. Har har har.

I make a note of the Toss-up buzzer nearby--the button is slightly bigger, but the tube is a little shorter than the Jeopardy! buzzer. No matter, I'm sure I'll be fine with it...especially since I heard that the index finger is actually faster than your thumb is.

Back to the green room we go, and here's the big moment--the draw. Eighteen ping-pong balls will decide who will still be our friends and who we may want to beat up in the parking lot later. Since I'm sitting in the back row, I draw one of the last balls out of the bucket (with a cry of "Big bucks, no whammies!" that goes unnoticed).

"And no peeking!" Karen admonishes us before we draw.

I'm reminded of Gary's joke that Jackie (or was it Karen?) was going to count to three and say, "Show me your balls!" after everyone had drawn.

It's a good thing I'm not Bradley Walsh.

Suddenly, the big reveal comes, and there's utter pandemonium after everyone tries to figure out just who they're up against. As long as I don't draw show number six, I'm fine. I turn my ball over to see just what I've gotten. Either the ball is blank, or I can't find the number...oh, there it is.

There's a big red "1" staring me in the face.

Show number one.

I'm going first.

Shit.

I learn I'm up against a young lady named Rachel and the other Josh (who had already won $100K on Millionaire). It's not the only instance of first-name duplicity, as the two Joannes are also playing against each other. Perhaps the two things that surprise us all besides that are the fact that Friday's show is all-male (Sam, Brian, and Sterling) and that Show 6 is all-female (Carey, Celeste, and Erika).

Then there's a position draw after everyone reacts accordingly, with three smaller red balls labeled 1, 2, and 3. My two opponents draw first, meaning they left me with...

...another 1. Red. Somewhat similar to cardinal for USC. Hey, why not, I'll take it.

Naturally, at this point, everyone's blood pressure is probably a lot higher than they want it to be. Luckily, the rehearsal quelled a lot of our fears about actually playing the game--it was here that you sorta settle into a routine for each of your turns. They tell you not to focus on the spinning wheel (which is actually really hard to do), make sure you're looking at the right arrow (which is also hard to do), watch the used letter board, examine the puzzle...

OK, that's great and all, but you've just inundated us with a metric assload of information. What are we supposed to do with it all?

My advice to future players is this: use the rehearsal to develop a routine for when the wheel is spinning, or when it's not your turn. Check the used letter board, look at the puzzle, have a letter in mind before the wheel stops. Check the scoreboard if you want; generally there isn't much of a need to do so unless it's Speed-Up time, but it may help you make more of an informed decision about your next play.

Three or four spins we get, and my group gets rotated out. Dangit, right when I knew the puzzle, too! (OK, fine, we got to practice both toss-ups, but still...)

Funny little blip happened during the rehearsals: there was a glitch with the puzzleboard during one of the rounds with a bigger puzzle. Midway through the round, I guess someone hit the wrong button and, instead of putting up the right letters, blanked the whole puzzle. Nothing they couldn't fix (they had to put all the letters back up as they were before they got blanked), but there's something you wouldn't see with the trilon board! At that point I was kinda half-expecting Missingno. to show up on the board, but I wondered if the Wheel staff was privy to such references.

Anyway, as our friend Steve gets to rehearse the Bonus Round, the rest of his fellow contestants take their places in the audience, and soon I'm getting my last few pre-show preparations set in place. Next thing you know, it's on the stage, Jim Thornton does the slate call, and then...showtime!

...to be continued after 4/28/14...

I can't believe I left out the fact that Vanna herself dropped by as we were getting acclimated with the wheel.

It took me a minute to process who she was, since she wasn't in a dress, but once she started talking (and giving her small bit of advice: "buy vowels!"), there was no question it was her. Reminded me of when Alex Trebek poked his head into the green room when I was on Jeopardy! 10 years ago...which led to him playfully pretend-pistol-whipping one of the kids with a banana. Vanna, of course, was not nearly as threatening (jokingly or otherwise).

One week 'til the big day...

...Random draw was the standard for many, many years. I hope that was just for College Week.

Thought I'd fill this out so you can identify some faces with the story I've told thus far, since some of their pictures are now up in the photo gallery on the $6K Every Day Minisite. No matchups have been spoiled, so BAVGO players, fear not.

Here she is! She had the telltale FedEx envelope tucked under her arm in the Starbucks.



She was NOT the one who played Lucky $even, but the part about being on TPIR shortly before Bob retired is true. And as it happens, I misspelled her name. Sorry, Joann!



The one who got the call in about six weeks is this guy, Andre.



Did I say two other gentlemen? I meant three. Andre, plus these two: Brian and Sam. I found out they're from the same general area--somewhere back east, I want to say Connecticut? It'll turn up in their interviews, I'm sure, I can't remember now.



And here he is! Another funny little moment in the green room while they were explaining each wedge--I seem to remember he said something about being afraid of the Express wedge displaying a Bankrupt at any given point (he might've been thinking of the Big Money Wedge from years ago), to which Alex said--jokingly!--something to the effect of, "We may have to consider that for later, though!"



Here's our buddy Steve!

TWO Joshes and Joanns?! Whoa...