A Boolean argument was expected.

August always makes me think of my childhood, of those fruitful late-summer days spent busy or bored, always struggling to maximize summertime fun against the constant reminders that “Back to School” time was just around the corner.  Part of that memory stems from the perennial noise that emits from the trees this time of year.  That insistent buzzing-whining drone.

When I was eight, playing in the backyard sandbox, my friend and I heard that sound and wondered what it was.  Looking up to the trees and seeing as well the power lines strung along the nearby road, I hypothesized that it was some kind of electrical noise from the wires.  My friend wondered why we only hear it in the summer, and I further conjectured that the summer heat caused the wires to leak electricity, or some such.

Hey, to an eight-year-old kid, it was plausible.  There’s something special about the age of eight.  It’s the age where you have a few years of elementary school under your belt, giving you the sense that you know a bunch of stuff.  What you don’t know, you can find out from a friend.  And if neither of you have an answer, you can always make one up.

I think my friend might have bought that explanation about buzzing noises caused by leaky wiring.  It was a few years before I learned the true cause: cicadas.

Walking the streets of our subdivision (which lacked sidewalks), we would often find these thin, stiff pieces of steel, usually around 5 or 6 inches long, lying near the gutters.  Where did they come from? I wondered.  A friend’s brother informed me they were car parts, some part of the suspension or leaf springs or brakes or something, and they fell off of older cars.

Again, plausible.  They were usually rusty, like the undersides of cars, and I could imagine some old Chevy (or not-so-old Gremlin) hitting a pothole and spewing these strips of metal from its fender wells.  But fifteen years later I noticed they were still around.  Couldn’t be a car part, I realised.  The technology has changed too much for these things to still be as frequent as in my youth.  It took very little research to find that they’re bristles from street sweeper brushes.

But here’s the greatest mystery — and apocryphal tale — of those long-gone summers.

One day, I and a few friends were patrolling the neighbourhood on our bikes.  We wandered over to the very edge of my allowed-without-informing-mom-in-advance range.  Perhaps a bit further than that, even; I wasn’t 100% sure I knew my way home.

We had reached a point at the eastern edge of town where one of the main avenues through the city crossed a road at the city limits and abruptly changed from a paved thoroughfare to a dusty gravel track that faded into chest-high weeds and grasses.  Beyond a rudimentary traffic barricade was a desolate, eerie land of deadly garter snakes and rusty beer cans; of gargantuan tobacco-spitting grasshoppers and dense, impenetrable second- or third-growth woodlots.

As I stood there with my cohort, pondering this unknown realm and whether the reward from its exploration outweighed the risk of getting grounded upon my return, a kid ambled out from the tall grass.  He was an older kid, but whether that meant he was 12, or 15, or more, is unclear to me now.  Someone in our party knew who he was; a classmate of an older sibling or some such.  He approached, stopped, and casually looked us over.

“You know,” he said, with a hint of a grin and a conspiratorial glance over his shoulder, “there’s a nudist colony back in those woods.”

This revelation was dumbfounding.  It was so utterly implausible that we launched into the obligatory chorus of “no way” and “yeah right.”  He insisted it was true: “I saw it myself.”  Naked people frolicking in the woods, he averred, though not in those exact terms.  “Go see for yourselves.”  And with that idle challenge, he walked away.

Did we meet that challenge?  I cannot vouch for my compadres, but I, for one, did not.  I figured I was already in enough trouble for straying this far afield.  To go beyond that point, in search of a fabled den of iniquity, was inconceivable.  My eight-year-old moralism said that if those people were depraved enough to be naked in public, there was no telling of what they might be capable — selling an eight-year-old boy into slavery, perhaps, or (worse yet) stealing his prized purple 3-speed bicycle.  I turned away, and rode home, intrigued but fearful.

Over the years, this mystery stayed in the back of my mind.  I sometimes heard further, similar rumours, reinforcing the possibility that a nudist colony really was tucked away amid the trees.  Yet by the time I was in high school that area had begun to be developed into a subdivision; the gravel road was replaced by a winding extension of the avenue, and I frequently drove through the area without spying any hint of a naked body or an enclave of debauchery.  My gentle skepticism turned to firm doubt.

Finally, when I was in college, I learned the truth: there was indeed — even then — nudity happening out there, but not a “nudist colony” per se.  Hidden in what remained of the woods was a deep, roughly rectangular, spring-fed quarry pond.  To access it one would park in back of an unremarkable apartment complex, cross over a railroad embankment, and follow a series of unmarked trails that meandered through clearings and skirted low marshes.  College students, mostly, used the pond to go skinny-dipping.  Those in the know called it Bare-Ass Lake.

In the years since then, the area has continued to be developed, and “Hidden Lake Drive” now passes right by the no-longer-hidden Bare-Ass Lake, stringing together little cul-de-sacs of tidy condominiums.   The developer had a sense of humour, however, and left us with a sanitized, punning in-joke: the nearest cul-de-sac is called “Bear Lake Drive.”

We have a house with two-pipe forced hot water heat. I think it’s the best. It has consistent warmth, it’s virtually silent, and it doesn’t reduce the humidity in the air like forced air does even when a humidifier is attached to the blower. Plus the big cast-iron radiator in the bathroom is a great way to dry bath towels and keep them warm for the next use.

Recently, I had to do some maintenance work on the boiler. This house and I have a karmic attachment, so whenever I perform work on it, the house responds positively and the result is beyond satisfying. Of course, each job still usually requires more than one trip to the hardware store, and is never complete until I’ve managed to draw at least a little blood… but that’s par for the course.

Anyway, I discovered the boiler had some plumbing issues when I stumbled across a quirk of its operation while firing it up in the fall. If the control system at the boiler has no power, and the thermostat upstairs is sending an “ON” signal, when the control system is powered up the boiler will immediately start firing — but the control will then ignore any subsequent signals from the thermostat, most notably the “OFF” command. This of course can lead to the boiler firing continuously.

I discovered this the hard way, by leaving the boiler unattended for a few days. When I returned, I found the radiators hot to the touch, the room temperature about 20 degrees above the thermostat setting, and the boiler running dangerously over pressure.

Obviously, the pressure relief valve, which should have opened wide at 30 psi to dump hot water all over the floor, was shot. To replace it, I had to drain the entire system, which took a while but not nearly as long as I’d feared. Then I pulled the valve off and drove over to my local Home Depot.

The Home Depot takes a lot of flak, much of it justified, for killing off mom-and-pop hardware stores. But that’s not my issue with them. My issue is that if you’re looking to build something new, Home Depot is an adequate place to start; but if you’re looking to repair or restore anything in a house more than about ten years old, you’re probably going to be SOL there. I’ve even been unable to find something as simple and basic as a round cover grate for a basement floor drain.

I showed the dead valve to two Home Depot associates, one supposedly the “plumbing department guy,” and neither had a clue as to what they were looking at beyond guessing that they didn’t have one to sell. They pointed me toward an Ace hardware several blocks up the road. The folks at this Ace had to shrug too.

So then I did what I should have done in the first place: I went to my favourite hardware store in town, Clark–Devon Hardware. This place is a sprawling collection of interconnected smaller buildings, seemingly cluttered but really just stocked to the rafters with everything a homeowner or contractor might need. The staff there is usually very helpful — there’s even one guy who hangs out in the nuts and bolts section, ready to spring into action to help you find exactly the nut or bolt or screw or washer that you need to complete your job.

That day was no exception. I showed the valve to the guy in the plumbing department, he took one look at it, said “OK,” and went to a cabinet where he pulled out an exact replacement. No problem at all.

I took the valve home and installed it on the boiler, only to discover the problem was bigger than I had imagined. When I opened the shutoff valve on the supply pipe, the sound was not one of rushing water but rather the quiet hiss of a mere trickle through a constricted opening. Turns out a pressure reducing valve, just downstream of the shutoff valve, meant to open wide to fill the boiler and then close when the system pressure reached 12 psi, was barely functioning. A lever on the valve to force it open (i.e. “fast fill” mode) would not budge. It would have taken hours, probably days, to fill the entire heating system with this valve in place, and the fact that it was incapable of correcting for low system pressure was dangerous as well. I had yet another valve to replace. (A later autopsy showed the valve’s innards to be caked solid with rust.)

Knowing better than to waste time again, I returned to Clark–Devon directly. Actually, my wife went for me, since it was rapidly getting cold outside and I was unwilling to wait until the weekend rolled around again before continuing work. Unfortunately, she did not have the valve with her, since I had left it attached to the boiler — I’d found that the shutoff valve was also worn out and passing water, so I felt it best to allow it to drain through the system rather than directly onto the floor. She found a guy who seemed helpful, and she put me on the phone with him, and between us we were able to determine that they didn’t have an equivalent valve in stock, but could get one in within a day. So I gave him the go-ahead, and he said he’d call when it came in.

That was the Tuesday of Thanksgiving week. The following Sunday morning, not having heard from them (but having been out of town during the holiday) I headed to Clark–Devon. There I found a service desk with no trace of the part nor any paperwork on it, and a guy in the plumbing department — oddly, the same guy who had found my relief valve in about two shakes — who was utterly unresponsive and unwilling to help us, suggesting we come back the next day when the guy who had placed the order would be in.

This is the first time Clark–Devon has ever dropped the ball on me, and I’m not going to let it colour my overall positive opinion of that store. I’ll go back there in the future, but probably not for plumbing parts. Likewise, a small neighbourhood hardware store that I stumbled across on my way home was also unable to help. (It seems like part of the problem is that in order to compete with the big boxes, mom-and-pop hardware stores have had to shrink their basic hardware supplies and now try to bring in customers by focusing more on housewares and small appliances.)

So on Monday, instead of dealing further with Clark–Devon, I called a local plumbing supply house. The place opens at an ungodly early hour, and is one of those places that caters almost exclusively to working tradesmen, a dingy brick building with a decrepit sign out front and a heavy steel door that rings a shockingly loud klaxon bell every time it’s opened (in case everyone is in the back and not manning the front counter). I won’t mention the company’s name, not because they weren’t helpful — ultimately they were, and had the part I needed — but because I’m going to have to mock them a bit to tell this story, which in my opinion gets a little goofy now.

I called them and explained that I had a feeder valve for a boiler that needed replacing, one that reduces the inflow pressure to 12 psi, with 1/2-inch threaded fittings on both sides. I called it a “boiler feed valve” because that’s the term the original manufacturer used for it. I had the tag from the original valve and told the guy on the phone the manufacturer’s name and all the specs I had. The guy said they didn’t carry that brand and started talking about a powered feed valve, i.e. one that would need an electrical connection to operate. This didn’t sound right to me, so I explained further what the valve did and where it was located in the system. He said, “you’re talking about a pressure reducing valve.” I said, “yeah, I guess I am,” and he replied that they had plenty of those in stock, so there would be no need for him to set one aside for me. I said I’d be right over and hung up.

When I got there it was still early, the dawn clouds making a gorgeous pink-and-purple display down Milwaukee Avenue toward the city. In front of the place an overweight guy was standing in the alcove, having perhaps his first smoke of the day. That he was nearly blocking the entrance and had a distinctly unwelcoming mien is neither here nor there.

Inside, I explained — again — what I needed. The young man at the counter deferred to an older guy, in his forties, who better knew the ropes. I said, “it’s a pressure reducing valve.” He pulled out a valve that didn’t look right at all, with 3/4-inch fittings that were oriented all wrong and with specs that didn’t add up for my application. I said, “this looks more like the relief valve I already have, except the direction of flow is reversed.” He said, “this is on a steam system?” and I said, or rather repeated since I’d already told him this, “no, two-pipe hot water.” He said, “and this valve is where, exactly?” I said, “on the supply side, just downstream of the city water cutoff.” He said, “oh, you need a feeder valve,” and handed over the exactly right part.

One which, according to the box it came in, is a Bell & Gossett FB-38 Pressure Reducing Valve.

I felt like I’d been dope-slapped, or had fallen through the looking-glass. It was one of those situations where specialists (and this is true in any field) have their own argot, a specialized language that they think only they understand, and when a civilian (i.e. non-specialist) appears, speaking the specialists’ own language, the tendency is to think that they don’t know what they’re talking about, even if they do. Which would mean I was caught in the trap of knowing exactly the specs of what I needed, and calling it by its proper name, and having everyone I spoke to hear something completely different.  It didn’t help that the specialists were inconsistent in the terminology of their own specialization.

Either that, or I was dealing with a bunch of idiots.

Anyway, following the replacement of a few other pipes in the feed line that were quadruple-bypass-sclerotic from rust, I succeeded in putting the boiler plumbing back in working order. With the new feeder — ahem, pressure reducing — valve, the system was quickly filled and bled of air, and I fired the burner up once again for another bitter Chicago winter.

It’s now Friday. The boiler has been happily cooking away — and shutting off on cue — for two days now, and all is well. Meanwhile, my supposed parts order from Clark–Devon still has not resulted in a phone call from them.

The following is the last in a five-part narrative about my appearance on Jeopardy! in 1997.

Part I: “How do you get to Sony Pictures Studios?”
Part II: The Mecca of Nerds
Part III: Showtime!
Part IV: December 10, 1997

Part V: Aftermath

As an episode of Jeopardy! closes, the three contestants stand with Alex and chat. Ever wonder what it is they’re talking about? Me too. I have almost no recollection of our little conversation that day, despite the appearance on tape of being engaged in some witty banter. It had something to do with lunch being next on the agenda; the one word I remember Alex saying, believe it or not, was “gravy.”

It wasn’t until I stepped off the stage and was handed the post-show release forms that I found out I had won a trip for two to Jamaica. Not my first choice for a vacation, nor my tenth, but it was a lot better than a bunch of furniture we don’t need, or a pair of his-and-hers watches, or a bunch of other second-place prizes they gave away that week. Plus, of course, they gave me all the random shit they always mention — Centrum Silver, Denorex, an Aiwa portable tape player, a Looney Tunes pocket watch, a dozen coupons for free bottles of Mrs. Butterworth’s, the electronic home game and the Jeopardy! scorekeeper (“so you can play along at home”). Piles of the stuff, most of which would arrive in various separate packages during the months following the air date. I’ll never understand why they sent the cough drops and Denorex samples via overnight FedEx. Like I couldn’t wait.

The show broke for lunch, and since I had no reason to stay I gathered up my stuff and met my girlfriend at the studio door. The audience was exiting through that same door, in clumps, and I got a lot of congratulatory and sympathetic comments from a number of senior ladies. Turns out she had made friends with them before the taping and they had all been rooting for me.

The next day I dropped her off in Beverly Hills to spend the day with her sister, and I drove alone down to Long Beach, where the Queen Mary was docked alongside a huge hangar housing Howard Hughes’ second-largest folly, the Spruce Goose. Except when I got there I learned the giant wooden flying boat had been packed onto a barge a few months before and shipped off to a museum in Oregon.

So, not having satisfied my aviation jones, I drove back north along the coast and stopped in Santa Monica at the Museum of Flying, built on the site that was the birthplace of the greatest aircraft in history, the Douglas DC-3. Except the museum is closed on Tuesdays.

I decided LA was trying to tell me something. I stayed in my hotel room the rest of the day, and the next morning we caught a flight back to Chicago.

It was gratifying to learn, once December rolled around, that the actress had been blown away in Thursday’s game, and wasn’t even a contender during that day’s final round. So much for the lucky reindeer.

Having had my shot at fame and fortune on Jeopardy!, I am now precluded from ever appearing on that show again. Which is fine with me. Having seen behind the curtain, I don’t even find the show all that interesting any more, and rarely watch it now. It may be the king of trivia game shows, but to me it has become old and stodgy. Still, I recommend that anyone who likes the show should give it a try. What do you have to lose? Me, I’m gunning now for Ben Stein. His show rocks, and I think I have a chance, albeit a small one, to win his money. Wish me luck.

The following is the fourth in a five-part narrative about my appearance on Jeopardy! in 1997.

Part I: “How do you get to Sony Pictures Studios?”
Part II: The Mecca of Nerds
Part III: Showtime!

Part IV: December 10, 1997

Caution: spoilers. Watch the tape first, or check out this analysis from the J! Archive fansite, and see the truth. Then read this, and find out what really happened.

From all appearances, it would seem that I was going great — tearing up the board — and then overextended myself on a Daily Double wager, causing me to panic and crash and burn. Not quite.

Let’s be honest. I kicked ass in the first round. I had confidence and knew virtually all the questions. Thanks to the actress’s psyche-out I avoided the Shakespeare category, which was a mistake because I knew all 5… but that didn’t matter because they handed me Let’s Play Clue, a board game I know all too well. (The player moving Colonel Mustard has the best odds of winning.) By the end of the round, I was leading by $200 over the actress. The returning champ was a distant third. The game was mine to win, or to lose.

Midway through the first round came the contestant chat, and my bullshit came back to haunt me. Alex could have asked me about my interest in space exploration, my rocketry web site, my history of bus trips through hell. But no, he went straight to the bottom of my list and asked about my unique hobby of collecting bricks from demolished historic buildings. So I chatted him up about the nostalgia (if not historical value) of the bricks I’ve collected, and managed to slip in a little commentary about the tragic loss of so many works by such great architects as Louis Sullivan.

I neglected to mention that one of the primary reasons I have these bricks is for the twentysomething outlaw thrill of sneaking into cordoned-off demolition sites.

I also failed to mention that the “collection” numbered, and remains, 2.

Then came the Double Jeopardy round. And tragedy struck.

It was going really well. My confidence was high, and I had the button under my thumb, both literally and figuratively — five times in a row I was first to ring in. Somehow I was managing to keep my knees from locking up. Then, from somewhere in the back of my head, or perhaps the ghost of the reindeer sitting on my shoulder, I’m not sure, came a voice:

“There’s a Daily Double behind Record Producers for $600.”

All through the orientation, the producers kept telling us, run the board top to bottom. That way you can get a feel for how the category is going to go, and even eliminate some possibilities since no two answers will have the same correct question. But I said to myself, what the fuck. I know rock and roll. So I asked for it.

Sure enough, a Daily Double. I freaked. Suddenly a sizable portion of my brain was shunted into answering the question, “how the fuck did I know that would be there?” I was surprised to see that I was well ahead and, rather than risk a sensible and tactical $1000, made a big mistake, wagering the margin between myself and second place. And then, the answer:

This person produced the all-time best-selling album in rock history.

Okay, I knew the album was “Thriller.” I also knew that Quincy Jones produced most of Michael Jackson’s albums. But the part of my brain that could put these two facts together was still busy looking for voices in my head, and the random name generator attached to my tongue said “who is David Geffen?”

From then on it was a lost cause, and a lead — I mean, a tie for the lead — dissolves pretty quickly when you start guessing at $800 and $1000 questions. When it came time to wager on Final Jeopardy, I didn’t have enough left to catch the leader. With the distribution of scores and the wagers I expected the others to make, I figured the best I could possibly do was second place, and a category as vague as Women didn’t leave me with any additional hope. Deep Space Probes would have been nice. I wound up betting that one of them would be wrong and would have bet a lot, so I only wagered a portion of my money in case I got it wrong as well. I anguished a while over the decision but never wrote a single number on my scrap paper, crunching numbers and logic in my head to try and find a solution that would let me win. It wasn’t there. In retrospect I should have just had the balls to bet it all, but even in my morose state I couldn’t bear the thought of having that goose egg on the front of my podium. (Not that the amount really matters. Only the winner takes the cash. Second and third places get the consolation prizes, but no money.)

I had a little vindication when I wound up being the only one to get the question right. The answer was:

One of three women, in the only statue that depicts women, in the U.S. Capitol rotunda.

I was stumped for almost all of Merv’s little song. Why a trio of women? All I could think of were temperancers, suffragists, and war nurses. Just in the last few moments I thought, well, she was important enough to put on a coin… and jotted down her name as fast as possible. I didn’t have time to change the weird phrasing (“What is Susan B. Anthony?”) that was in fact caused by the producers admonishing us to fill in those words during the wagering phase so that we wouldn’t be disqualified for not phrasing it in the form of a question. (They claimed “What is” would be the correct phrasing, but obviously they had their heads up their legally-protected asses.)

I wound up in second place, just as expected. The champ shot his wad and came in third. The actress/witch and her goddamned reindeer got the cash.

Part V: Aftermath

The following is the third in a five-part narrative about my appearance on Jeopardy! in 1997.

Part I: “How do you get to Sony Pictures Studios?”
Part II: The Mecca of Nerds

Part III: Showtime!

We returned to the Green Room, where makeup artists prepped us for television lighting and we changed into our dress clothes. Beyond the sound-proofed walls, and our awareness, an audience was led into the studio, one consisting about half-and-half of retirees and white-polo-uniform-shirt-wearing school kids, plus of course the few dozen guests of the folks in the Green Room. Then they pulled two of our names out of a hat (not me) and sent them to get fitted for wireless mikes and to mentally prepare to go up against the returning champ. The rest of us were then paraded into the set and seated in the aforementioned rows of audience seats, making sure to be on our best behaviour and refraining from talking to the people we knew in the stands. Just a smile and a wave, please. With everyone staring and the simmering nervousness in the room, I felt more like we were condemned murderers than contestants.

Or perhaps I should continue to say “prospective contestants.” See, the way the show works is this. They tape 5 episodes, one full week, in a day — three before lunch, two after — and only tape two days a week, so in fact the returning champion, winning on a Friday episode and coming back the following Monday, had really been waiting since the previous Tuesday to defend his title. Now, the producers have no idea until an episode ends just how many new contestants they’ll need: usually 2, but if there’s a winners tie then only 1, and if someone becomes a Five Day Champion that person is sent home and they’ll need to fill all 3 spaces.  (The Five Day Champion rule has since been abolished.)  So until they actually pull your name from the hat and say “you’re on the next episode, come with us,” there’s no guarantee whatsoever, even after all the rigmarole you’ve gone through, that you’ll actually be on the show. A person could potentially sit through two whole days of taping without ever having their name called.  I’m not sure what the producers would do with you then.

Johnny Gilbert, the guy who reads “Now entering the studio are today’s contestants…” and all the Rice-a-Roni hoo-ha at the end, was up in the audience with a cordless mike, putting the crowd at ease and in a good mood as only a professional raconteur can. He was wearing a gold satin jacket, embroidered with the Jeopardy! logo on the back and left breast, and a fine silver toupee. Like seeing a radio d.j. introduce your favourite band, it was weird to watch this unfamiliar, slightly paunchy, overly tanned, nearly 70-year-old dude, while hearing that voice we all know so well. Johnny reiterated the audience rules (no shouting, clap for the applause sign) to a group that had probably already heard them a few times before, and then we settled down for the first episode.

Of course, Jeopardy! is not a live show. They keep a buffer of at least a couple of months in the can, just in case. Though it was the last week in September, the episodes being taped would not air until the second week in December. Even knowing this, I was a little nonplussed when Alex Trebek finally appeared and his first words to the camera were, “Two and a half weeks to go before Christmas. Have you done your shopping yet?”

A show goes by pretty fast, even during the taping. They don’t stop the tape during most of the commercial breaks, so that two minute “pause that refreshes” is the exact same duration as the pause in the studio. They blank out the Big Board, bring the contestants a sip of water, and Johnny goes up into the audience to ease the tension and answer questions from the peanut gallery. The only time the tape stops during a normal show is between the Double Jeopardy! round and the final round, when the contestants are given unlimited time (and scraps of paper) to calculate their wagers before writing them on their light-pen pads.

Except when there’s a goof, and there was a big goof in this first episode. Two categories in adjacent columns were City TV and Driving. This guy from NYC ran them together and asked for City Driving for $300. The controller heard the City part and punched the button for City TV, revealing a Daily Double. Stop tape! Did he say City Driving? Playback. Sure enough. The judges debated for a while — quite a while, as if this had never happened before, which I can’t imagine — before deciding that he should request City TV for the same amount, but the Daily Double would be moved to somewhere else on the board. They reset the board, rewound the tape, and just as if nothing ever happened, Alex prompted the guy to request a category. Watching the tape, it’s seamless. There’s a tiny, subtle shift in mood due to the delay, but unless you know where it is you’d never notice it.

The delay to figure all this out and reset everything took around 15 minutes. During this time Johnny Gilbert answered audience questions as usual. Someone asked a question about Alex Trebek that Johnny didn’t know the answer to, so he turned around and called out to Alex, who was sitting in a high director’s chair down on the studio floor, reading a magazine.

A question frequently asked by people who find out I was on the show is, “What’s Alex really like?” Here’s the answer: he’s a robot. For all I know they had the Animatronic Alex there that day. Alex looked up from his magazine as if startled from a reverie — or a powersave mode — and gazed up at Johnny with a look that seemed to say, “How dare you involve me with the hoi polloi?” Johnny coaxed a reply from Alex, but I don’t recall that he answered the woman’s question, whatever it was, with more than a nod or single syllable.

The first episode passed in a blur, I was so nervous. I found myself wishing it had been my turn at the podium — there was a category of Astronaut Lingo I could have swept even with major head trauma — and the Final question was a piece of cake. The old champ got beaten and two new contestants were picked. Again, not me. The tension level for me remained steady — my chances of being picked were slowly rising but my comfort level was too, so it all balanced out. They took the trio backstage and swapped mikes around (the mikes correspond to each podium, so the new champ had to give back mike #3 and take mike #1). Meanwhile, I chatted with the prospective next to me, a young woman from New York with an ebullient, egoistic personality — quite obviously an aspiring actress. She psyched me out by mentioning that she and her roommate had stayed up late the night before, cramming Shakespeare — and then offhandedly quoted verbatim a few lines in one of his many plays from which I’d have trouble naming three characters (even though it might have been Troilus and Cressida).

Then, the second game. If not for having a tape of it, I’d remember not a thing, as all three contestants were infinitely dull and even the categories sucked. Once again, the champ was usurped.

And then, they called my name. And that of the actress beside me. We ran through the prep routine and before I knew it, I was standing first in line at the base of those newly-striped steps. Just before tape rolled, the actress put her good-luck charm, a little stuffed reindeer, on my shoulder, feigning best wishes to me. I politely shrugged it off, knowing a witch’s hex when I saw one. And then the music began.

Part IV: December 10, 1997

Part V: Aftermath