Not to brag, but I’ve always been a sort of whiz when it came to trivia. As a young child, I had my head buried in books and lived for getting more answers right than the contestants on Jeopardy. I avoid homework by playing Trivial Pursuit and Sporcle.com. Second to my desire of being an esteemed journalist, I dreamt of winning big on a television game show. Last fall, I made my own dream come true, and it was surprisingly easier than I’d thought.
The important thing, above all, is to always be—excuse the pun—game to be on a game show. After a long day of training for a new job, working at Admissions, and finishing a Welcome Week Captain shift, I was exhausted. I walked into my residence hall with one goal in mind: to make it to my bed in one piece. As I walked past the Resource Desk, I noticed some colorful flyers that screamed “WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE NYC AUDITIONS WED AND THURS!” Immediately, the trivia nerd and narcissist in me thought it best to take advantage of this opportunity that had fallen into my hands. Sleep could wait.
I hopped on a train to West 67thStreet at 4:30 p.m. and waited in the line to go into the testing room at the ABC station at 5 p.m. They herded in about 100 or so people into a room and gave everyone a scantron—think the SATs. We all sat at little round tables with our #2 pencils and wrote our names down. I was practically the youngest person in the room, as almost everyone else was middle-aged or portly. The producer assistants gave us a test in a sealed envelope, 30 multiple-choice trivia questions NOT to be open until the timer began. My usual test anxiety started to kick in, but I kept my cool (always necessary if you want to be on national TV).
As we began and I skimmed the questions, I smirked. I easily knew at least 20 of the 30 questions on the test. “Who was the only president to be inaugurated on an airplane?” (LBJ, after Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, where I’m from) “Which president is the furthest right on Mount Rushmore?” (Easy: Lincoln) “What do diastolic and systolic measure?’ (Psh: blood pressure. High school biology, anyone?!) I finished with a few minutes to spare, so I checked over my answers. When the buzzer rang and the tests were taken up, the girls next to me said the test was really hard. “Really? Because I thought it was easy.” Sometimes my arrogance is hard to restrain!
The PAs tallied up the highest scores and called out about 15-20 of the top scorers. My heart started racing. What if I was getting too cocky? What if I was in a room full of Ken Jennings replicas? Then I heard my contestant number called, freaked out, and promptly went to the other side of the room with the others that made it too.
It’s a rule of thumb that producers want excited, happy-looking contestants on their game show, because it is a show that’s possibly viewed in thousands or millions of old folks’ homes all over the country (kidding, I still watch it occasionally). So I had made it to the audition round, where the production assistants interviewed me and subsequently taped me to show the head producers, so that they may decide who would make for good television.
When I introduced myself for the taped portion, I said, “Hi, my name is Phoebe Kingsak, I’m a junior at NYU studying journalism and cinema studies…so basically I’ll be working in a café for the rest of my life.” (Self-deprecating humor is good humor.) When asked about something cool I’ve done, I told them how I snuck into the Grand Canyon on the road trip home from San Diego’s Comic-Con last summer. Or when they wanted to know something odd about me, I said I dance awkwardly and fist-pump in clubs. Of course, they asked me to demonstrate this on-camera, and I happily obliged. While it seemed as though I was acting a fool, I was just being my goofy, entertaining self; the personality that I use on all my NYU campus tours. They thanked me for my time and said they’d let me know soon.
Two weeks later, in fact, I received a call to be on the September 30thtaping. It all happened so fast, but I’m 100% positive it was my energy and enthusiasm that convinced them I should be on the show. No one wants to watch or root for a sullen contestant who talks about cats or bagging groceries (unless that’s your thing, then by all means go ahead). Be excited, be spontaneous, and don’t be afraid to go for the big money. Then again, if you’re out of lifelines and are down to two choices…best to just walk away with what you’ve got in your pocket: a load of money, 15 minutes of fame, and the experience of a lifetime that you’ll share with everyone for years to come, whether they want to hear it or not. And high-fiving Meredith Viera on-air is pretty legendary too.