Saturday, September 3, 2011

Kathy's Thursday Jeopardy Episode Part II: The Interview


(Again, you can see the Thursday, 10/21/10 episode here.)


5:00 Interview with Alex! I thought I’d be really nervous at this part, but I sort of forgot about the interview during the commercial break. In case you’re wondering, every break consists of you testing your buzzer and getting pumped up
by the Jeopardy! wranglers to play again. And in the meantime I tried to follow another Trebekistan strategy of using the break to look at the category names and try to predict what questions might come up. The first break is especially distracting because that's when each challenger gets a picture taken with Alex.


Beeeeep! Contact with Alex! Beeeeep!

You have to submit five facts about yourself to Jeopardy! as well as answers to some other questions (“What’s the most interesting place you’ve ever visited,” etc.) to fulfill the wranglers’ hopes of your uttering something somewhat interesting while on TV. Based on my faux interview with a wrangler that morning, I was under the impression that Alex would either ask about the twins or my background in geography/cartography. “Since Alex hosts the Geography Bee he likes to talk about geography,” I was told. Nope, Alex caught me off-guard by asking about my 1300 Yelp restaurant reviews. They cut out the part where I said I’d been to 60 Thai, 10 Ethiopian, and 16 Persian restaurants, and 21 Indian lunch buffets just in the Bay Area, I guess in order to spend more time talking about middle guy’s quest for a giant hamburger.

Then Alex asks “Are you not a good cook?” which sort of paints me into a box. Do I tell the truth and say, “Well, I’m an okay cook but don’t really enjoy it, and definitely don’t have time lately with the babies, and really the ethnic food I can buy in a restaurant is never as good what I can make at home"? or do I just provide a good end to the conversation? And thus I set women’s lib back 50 years by saying “Don’t ask my husband that question.”


"So, home audience, let's see if I can come up with an uncomfortable question to ask."

In case you’re wondering about the other stories I submitted besides Yelp reviews, being a twin mom (they wanted me to mention the babies' birth as a "Day that Will Live in Twinfamy"), and being a cartographer, they are:
-Getting fired from a Polish travel agency for not speaking Polish
-Visiting 66 different Chevys restaurants (and winning a contest to fly to NYC and New Orleans to go to more, and going to 10 Chevys in one weekend)
-Moving to my first house literally the day I return from Jeopardy!

And I answered the bare minimum of their leading questions. (Why did I choose my major? I love maps and memorize capitals for fun. Unfortunately not part of the curriculum. Do you have a dream job? Yes, writing questions for Jeopardy!. Hook me up, Alex. Funniest travel memory? Puking my guts out in a plane over the Pacific and having to sneak into business class to puke in their bathrooms after my puke clogged the ones in coach. I can’t imagine why they didn’t use that story.)

If I’d become a 74 game winner like Ken Jennings you could have expected to hear about all these (non-)adventures.



Next time: Kathy's Thursday Jeopardy Episode Part III: The Game Gets Worse Before Getting Better

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