Requiem for a Million

Who wants to be stressed?

A Prelude

The whole thing started as a joke. I saw an advertisement in the Plain Dealer announcing that auditions for Who Wants to be a Millionaire were coming to Cleveland in early summer.

Although not certifiably socially phobic, I do just about anything I can in life to avoid long lines. However, I found myself in the Flats, standing in an interminable, snaking one, inside a large tented pavilion. I stood behind a middle-aged woman with an enormous fountain drink, who had taken the day off from her job at a diner to enter the line. She and two other local gentlemen immediately began discussing how President Obama had ruined the economy and immigrants should be thoroughly tested in English before being allowed to enter our country. I found it difficult to listen to their ramblings as I soaked in the unmistakable sense of desperation and Midwestern humidity in the air. Conversations hovered between how Cleveland was going to keep LeBron and how Cleveland was going to keep jobs.

After waiting for several hours, I took a trivia quiz at a tiny chair next to the Tea Partiers I’d queued behind. While the quizzes zipped through the Scantron that graded them, the crowd clamored for t-shirts, pencils, and any free swag they could get their hands on.
 
When the results came back, someone called my number indicating that I had passed and would be put into yet another long line, this time numbering merely hundreds of people. I was relieved that regardless of how much further I went in the process, I was at least smarter than the man next to me demanding the whereabouts of Obama’s “real” birth certificate.

I was now into my seventh or eighth hour of the audition, and finally I met with a producer who interviewed me about why I wanted to be on the show.  All I remember is making a joke about Kim Kardashian, and then being whisked behind the scenes to a video interview. There, the producer admired my newly acquired glasses and told me that I could expect to hear whether or not I’d be put into a contestant pool (where you can stay for two years) within the next six weeks. Looking back, I think it’s fair to say that my addiction to reality television and recent trip to LensCrafters are the only reasons I ever made it on the show.

After an eventful morning of sitting, testing and smiling for numerous cameras, I came back to my apartment and crossed auditioning for a game show off my bucket list. I quickly forgot about my foray into entertainment as the summer went on. I got married, as did my brother. LeBron took his talents to South Beach. My trip to the Flats faded as I prepared for another year of teaching fifth grade in Cleveland.

Plot Thickens

On August 23, a producer from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire called and left a message informing me that I'd been selected to appear on the program and had until 5pm to return the call or forfeit my place to another contestant. Rushing to prepare for the start of school, an already frenetic time of meeting parents, arranging desks, and photocopying scores of handouts, the producer’s call mostly added to the stress. I knew it was a unique opportunity, but it really couldn’t have come at a worse time. I was imagining introducing myself to my students and then immediately telling them that I’d be gone for the next week and a substitute would have to take care of everything.

When I called her back, the producer belted elatedly, “You’re on the show!” and waited for an equally expectant response from me. I half-heartedly muttered, “Wow, I can’t believe it,” and asked her for more details. She explained that I was needed in New York in two weeks, where taping could take three days.

With the logistics settled, the two-week countdown to the show began. My boyfriend Josh, who must have been a Romanian gymnastics trainer in another life, sprang into action as my trivia tutor. A veritable Bela Karolyi to my Kerri Strugg, he watched hours of past episodes and created a strategy for attacking each question. My initial indifference soon transformed into an all-consuming quest for knowledge. I purchased and read massive tomes like The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge” and Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. 

We broke down past questions into categories and focused on my weak spots like sports and science, and played thousands of rounds of the board game version in preparation for the show. I read six to seven hours a day, neglecting my job, my health and my sanity. Every conversation, every radio story, every article I read became things to further research when I got home. Each fact I heard was scrutinized under the guise of “What if it’s a question on the show?” and I exhausted myself trying hopelessly to know everything. My desperate attempts to win mirrored quite ironically those very folks next to me in line I’d scoffed at months before during the audition.

Meanwhile, tensions between Josh and I grew as we approached the taping. He began asking me when I would be home from work to study and created outlines of the content I should be reviewing. While he was an immeasurable help, our collective obsession with the show temporarily destroyed our romantic life. We went to bed with trivia cards and woke up playing online versions of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. As I became more skilled at the game, my hopes for success grew. 

I began to seriously consider the fact that I could win hundreds of thousands of dollars, that this could alter my entire future and provide security for my family, that I would be unburdened with debts and the need to scrupulously budget on my teacher’s salary. While Josh never said any of this, sensing his hope for similar results only multiplied the pressure. By the time I reached New York, my initial trip to the Flats had become anything but a joke.