
Mr. D on Jeopardy! Ain't he a handsome devil.
Los Angeles is still a different planet to me. I can still remember going to my sister’s wedding, sitting next to my father. After numerous trips to visit her, Dad had only this to say:
“These people are weird. They’re pretty stupid, too.”
It’s hard to argue with that.
Take the roads, for example. On the day of my appearance on Jeopardy!, I was in my sister’s apartment, the home base of the morning’s operations. Since she lived in the northern part of the city, just south of Griffith Park, getting to the Culver City studios would be a hike. So I Googled the directions, as I normally would. It showed a logical, straightforward path using highways and one local street.
My sister gave me this look, a look which said, “Why not nail yourself to a hunk of wood and hang suspended over Los Feliz Boulevard. That would be less painful than the route you have in your hand.”
So we took PhDini’s route, which looked like a staircase to Hell. Left here, Right on Sunset, Left on La Brea, Right on Pico, Left on Crenshaw, Right on Venice…I forgot the rest, but somehow I made it to the Sony Pictures lot. Sis alleges this was faster than the freeway. According to most Angelenos, EVERY route is faster than the freeway.
As I got to the gate, the casting director who called me the month before greeted me and we boarded a tram bus to the Jeopardy! lot. I have to admit, it was really cool to be on a working studio and not on the little tram tour–although I expected more noise. The hanger-like sound lots are eerily quiet from the outside. The casting director was, like me, from Brooklyn. Insert California transplant cliché here.
Apparently, since I elected to stay with PhDini instead of fork up dough for my accommodations, I did not arrive with most of the other contestants. They were waiting for me, but they didn’t seem to mind. I missed a lot of the pre-show harangue from the casting team–the same team with the Hollywood smiles from June. I hung up my extra wardrobe (we’re mandated to bring three wardrobe changes) and helped myself to coffee in the green room.
Each of us then went for makeup. The makeup people were gushing over my tanned complexion, which I worked on assiduously on a beach vacation in Rehoboth, Delaware. One of them said I had the perfect skin for television. Made up, dressed and caffeinated, I chatted with my fellow contestants.
In all honesty, I was expecting hyper-intelligent, yet hyper-competitive Ivy-League types and Ph.D candidates from MIT, the kind that would slit their mother’s throat to get the A in the economics class at Harvard. You remember those guys—they sat at the front of the class, kept answering inane questions to show their paper-thin intelligence or the fact that they sacrificed their social skills for doing all the month’s readings ahead of time, and always seemed to hang around the professor after class. I would’ve preferred the weird dictionary lady from the audition.
What I got was the exact opposite. On the whole, my fellow contestants had to be the nicest, friendliest people I’ve met here. They came from all walks of life and all over the country, and the last thing they were thinking of was beating you. They were pleasant, warm, pretty relaxed, and in a really fun state of mind. This was a game show, after all, and we were all in the same boat, so there was no point into finding an “edge.”
Rehearsal came next, and we were all escorted to the stage. It was cold, empty, and a lot smaller than I thought. The game board was showing cartoons as test patterns. I got up to the podium and felt the paint–cheap paint job, I thought. Maybe this was due to the High-Definition broadcasts. I sneaked around to Alex Trebek’s podium, just to see from his vantage point–he wouldn’t show until the actual taping. This was the point when it became real: I’m going to be on television, so I better not look like an ass. Maybe another browsing of the Norton Anthology would do me good.
It took some time to get used to the timing of the buzzer. The buzzers are activated by a guy offstage with a button. He waits for Alex to finish speaking, then presses a button to light up white Christmas lights around the board (you can’t see them on TV). My button technique took some doing, yet I felt confident enough that I could manage. It also helped that we joked around during rehearsal, doing our best Sean Connery impersonations. I chimed in with “An Album Cover” (“Anal Bumcover”).
Before each game, two names were drawn to be the contestants against the returning champion, this time a grad student from Boston. He was good, and we were all waiting for him to go down because no one wanted to tangle with his buzzing prowess. I did not get called first, which was a relief. The remaining contestants sat in a sectioned off corner of the audience while the three combatants down, Johnny Gilbert, the announcer, makes his windup speech, introduces the contestants, and out comes our hero Mr. Trebek.
It amazes me how many mistakes are made in the course of taping. Alex must be getting old because he flubs on a number of questions. Yet what really impresses is what you don’t see. On commercial breaks, Alex re-records these questions so that the editors can splice together a clean, finished product. Johnny Gilbert also re-records some contestant introductions. It’s not just clean-cut white kids anymore—all those Asian, Indian and Eastern European names have gotten poor Johnny tongue-tied.
What isn’t so clean is Alex’s extemporaneous banter with the audience, which he uses to relax and maintain his flow. Most of his responses are rather mundane: personal details, what it’s like to work on the set, does it ever get tiring, etc. He handles these easily enough. Sometimes, though, his inner voice gets the better of him:
Little Girl: “Do you have any pets?”
Alex: “Do I have any pets? What pets do you have?”
Little Girl: “Two kitties and a bunny!”
Alex: Two kitties and a bunny?! Why don’t you bring them over to my house and feed them to my dogs!”
This was among the tamer comments he made. If for nothing else, Alex’s off-color remarks and dark humor kept the taping session moving along.
Five shows were taped that day. I sat through four shows, growing more nervous by the hour. Plus it was getting warm in there. By the time my name was called for the last show, I was sweating like a hog and couldn’t button my coat. The makeup people—the same people who complemented me on my skin—were daubing frantically while I was getting miked up.
The Alan Shepard prayer kept ringing in my head, “Lord don’t make me f**k up.”
Part III will cover the show and the aftermath.
Wendy Kopp, why is TFA abducting so many Hoyas?
Reading a recent article in Education Week, it appears that the old alma mater is getting recognized in another category: recruiting for Teach for America.
For my casual readers in the Neighborhood, let me just say that TFA and I have an understanding. Ever since my last rant at the institution, it may be best that we stay out of each others way. You wouldn’t want to see me at Wendy Kopp’s cocktail party, that’s for sure. The johnny-come-latelys of the TFA crowd, who cry that I’m a tool of the unions and unsympathetic to the plight of children, can cram it, for all I care.
I don’t like holding a grudge, though. First of all, TFA is too easy a punching bag. Many of the blogs linked on my page and on others do a far better job of deflating the Kopp Reich than I. Second, it does my readers little good to hear me complain about an institution with which I have little, if any, connection. So I’m offering an olive branch to Wendy Kopp. Let’s play nice, shall we? We can have a drink, a few laughs…we can both torture kids with standardized tests.
I just have one condition. Please stop taking so many students from Georgetown.
The sidebar of the Education Week article, which covers the record number of applications from college seniors for TFA, also gave some stats on the class of 2009. 4,100 young people will be invading classrooms next year–which is little assurance to me, as my school may lose a couple of positions. Georgetown University’s class of 2009 had 11 percent of the seniors apply for TFA. It is considered the largest employers of graduates on campus, joining the likes of Brown, Emory, the University of Chicago and the University of Connecticut.
Now I’m not against my fellow Hoyas pursuing a career in education. I worry because I know my own classmates. Whereas most are pretty decent people, I don’t see a lot of them with the stamina for a classroom in a high-needs area. Sorry, Chip, but teaching Algebra I at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx is not like tutoring your 4th Form chums at Groton. Also, a lot of my class was downright insufferable–the teachers’ pet type. My kids would have a field day with these prizes. It would be great to see that smarmy prick from my US Political Systems class get the heave-ho out a classroom window.
It must be a dismal economy that so many of my fellow Hoyas are opting for the TFA experience. This, also, is a problem. The economy is driving lots of people to service, but for the wrong reasons. The teacher you want to keep is not the accounting major who’s waiting to ride out the unemployment numbers before landing the next seat at Goldman Sachs. It’s the student who has the choice of any corporate cush-job in America, yet CHOOSES to join the noble profession of teaching.
So Wendy, I have to ask: What’s with so many Hoyas? Is the economy really that bad? Or did Duke and Harvard send you to steal away talent so that their schools can get the plush jobs? Is this payback for us taking John Thompson III away from Princeton? Were you a Villanova fan in a past life?
I don’t know if we can ever have the answer. Maybe it’s too complex for my union-addled mind. What I do know is that the high rate of Hoya participation makes us look bad. It makes us look like do-gooders and missionary-pariahs. Its bad enough Georgetown alums are in positions at every level of government and business–positions that allow us to fuck things up in spectacular ways. Now they’re marshalled into classrooms to teach children badly until the economy improves. If societal destruction is your aim, we can do more damage in other sectors of society, like the White House.
If you let in any more Hoyas, Wendy, make sure they really want to make a difference. Otherwise, these kids will be wasting my kids’ valuable time–time they should be spending on their projects on the civil rights movement.
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Tagged as Comedy, Commentary, Cultural Literacy, current events, Curriculum, Education, Educational leadership, Georgetown University, Hoyas, Humor, Humour, Media, news, Opinion, Social studies, Teach For America, Teachers, TFA, Wendy Kopp