Have you seen Alex Trebek’s hairless face?
Growwwwwwwwwwlll!!!
Damn, he’s a silver fox! Yumm.
I just can’t resist a man who knows everything.
Once, as a lark, I applied for Jeopardy. I took the entrance test over the internet and was selected to go to the second round. It was in Minneapolis on a Saturday morning, so I bribed my friend Fern into going on the road trip with me. We left Green Bay at 4:00 A.M. in my friend Mary Kaye’s borrowed car.
Five and a half hours later, we arrived in Minneapolis and I went to the second round along with 179 other wannabe contestants. There, we took at 50 item test, comprised of only Final Jeopardy questions. We had 8 seconds to answer each item on a piece of paper. We needed to get 45 items right to proceed to the next round, which would entail a mock-Jeopardy taping.
I sat at a very small table with 9 other contestants. It was nearly impossible to keep other people from looking at your paper or to keep from looking at the papers of other people. The questions were on videotape, read by Alex Trebek. The girl next to me confided that this was her fourth time auditioning for the show and the last time she tried, Alex was actually there.
The questions began’. Some of them were relatively easy and some were unbelievably hard. This was before Jeopardy came under fire for being slanted toward male questions, and I could definitely see where someone would derive that idea. There were many questions about sports, college football team’s mascots, and science. This is not to say that women don’t know these topics, but I had a much easier time answering ‘This poetess read her poem ‘A rock cries out for us today’ at President Clinton’s 1993 Presidential Inauguration’ than ‘This mineral is the last listed on the Table of Periodic Elements’. Another one I guessed at: ‘This Archbishop of Canterbury was killed accidentally by followers of King Henry II.’ I guessed ‘Edmund BlackAdder’.
Next to me, two jocks cheated openly. One quick glance at their papers told me I had nothing to worry about. Roughly 35 spots remained unfilled and instead of listing ‘Maya Angelou’ for the ‘poetess’ question, one had written ‘Shel Silverstein’ and the other had written ‘Dr. Seuss’.
The test was over in about ten minutes. They gathered up our sheets and took them to a back room for scoring. Miss Four Auditions next to me stated that many of the questions had been recycled from her previous auditions and she had looked them all up beforehand.
Finally they returned and announced that of the 179 of us auditioning, only 16 people made it to the next round. They announced the sixteen people who had scored 45 or higher (including Miss Four Auditions) and then gave the rest of us losers our sheets back.
The Jock Crew had scored a collective 16 on their sheets. Miss Four Auditions scored a whopping 48.
I looked down at my sheet. Six things marked as incorrect. One of the producers had drawn a little sad face on my sheet in red ink. I suppose it was to show empathy, perhaps to say ‘Awwww, so close’, but to me, the menacing little frown was mouthing ‘Wasn’t this worth a five hour drive at 4 am in the morning? Sucka!!!’ I couldn’t watch Jeopardy for months after that.
It was a strange weekend. We probably should have turned around right then and went home, but Fern and I were determined to make a fun weekend of it. We tooled around the Maul for awhile and then drove around trying to find the casino, where Fern was determined to make big dollars. Fern worked at our local Den of Iniquity, so was banned from playing there, but she was certain that with her experience she could beat their system.
We finally found the area near the casino. Then we drove around trying to find a hotel. Everything was either booked or $150 a night, which was far too rich for our blood. We finally found a little motel on an access road on the freeway. We pulled into their gravel driveway and immediately hit the biggest pothole I have ever seen and have yet to see a match for. We entered the main office and a door opened from the back room. Through the door, we could see the stereotypical ‘Trailer Trash’ scenario’. Swarthy unshaven man wearing a stained ‘wife beater’ undershirt, sitting on a 1970’s brown plaid chair. The television, with rabbit ears the size of canoe paddles, laden with aluminum foil, showed a grainy WWF program. The floor was strewn with various plastic toys and two children, wearing only disposable diapers and Kool-Aid mustaches, played on the floor. A toddler was picking up cigarette butts off the floor and placing them gingerly atop the flowing ashtray, like some kind of white trash pick up sticks.
A frightened-looking wife who looked like she’d been third place in a Sun-In war approached us. ‘We’re looking for a room with two beds.’ Fern asked. ‘Do you want it for the night, or just a few hours?’ The woman asked us. ‘Um, for the night.’ Fern stated. ‘That’ll be forty dollars.’ The woman said, looking at us through squinted eyes. ‘Let’s find someplace else.’ I said.
Back to the car, we tried desperately to find another place to stay that was in our budget, but all reasonable hotels were full. After some encouragement from Fern, we went back to the motel on the highway. When we approached this time, I noticed that the name of the motel was actually ‘Savage Motel’, but Fern said that she had noticed that the town we were in was actually called ‘Savage’, so it didn’t mean anything.
When we pulled back into the parking lot, we hit another pothole so deep that we both bounced up and actually hit our heads on the roof of the car. We stopped for a moment to regain our wits and then noticed that there were no less than 15 swarthy looking men all staring at us. We parked the car, grabbed our bags, locked the car about thirty times, and then ran into the office with all thirty eyes on us the entire time.
We paid our forty dollars and went up to our room. The doors were the hollow core doors one would see on the bedroom of a track home. I feared that I would fall through it when I pushed on the door to open it. Instead of having two beds, there was one bed and one fold-up bed in the closet. The walls were painted paneling. Through the walls on either side, we could hear men laughing and having a great time. We quickly locked the door and moved the side table in front of the door. This exposed the used, wadded up tissue, half a Dorito, and a used condom. Instead of a bedspread, the bed was covered with a mustard yellow knobby blanket that had definitely warmed souls during the Cuban Missile Crisis. When I moved the bed over to make room for the foldup bed, there was a two-inch deep divot in the carpet. I could only imagine the types of grunting and thrusting which would cause a huge divot in the carpet.
The bathroom light needed to be turned on by screwing in the lightbulb. Scary curly hairs adorned the tiny cement shower.
We watched some television on the tiny 13-inch television (which had decidedly better picture than that of the proprietors) and then decided that we’d just go to sleep rather than going out for dinner. We didn’t want to leave because the idea of actually coming BACK to the hotel was terribly depressing.
Fern opted for the fold-up bed but I think she got the better deal. When I pulled back the mustard colored blanket, I noticed that there were two interesting spots on the sheets. I slept above the covers.
At one point in the night, I was awakened by the sounds of deep snoring. ‘Hmmm, must be Fern.’ I got up and started to walk across the room in the dark, thinking more about the possibility of stepping on cockroaches, when Fern, who had obviously been awake, said ‘Oh, that snoring isn’t you.’ I stopped dead in my tracks. We listened and that’s when we realized that not only was the snoring coming from the walls, it was coming from both sides of the room. Our partying neighbors had apparently passed out.
Neither of us took a shower in the morning. We woke up at 6:00 A.M, packed our bags, removed the obstructions from the door, and left as soon as we could. I was in a hurry because Esteban and I were going to see Blues Traveler in Green Bay that night.
We stopped at a little diner and had breakfast. Fern was still insisting on going to the casino. Fine, I said, but we can only spend an hour there because it’s about a six hour drive home from here and I still have to bring the car back to Mary Kaye.’
We went to the casino and Fern literally left me at the door, disappearing in the smokey depths. Two hours later, we were out of there, speeding the entire way.
We got back home thirty minutes before the concert. Esteban had been panicked. I went to the concert in the same smoky clothes I had put on at the Savage Motel.
The concert was great. We had third row tickets. A little known band called The Wallflowers opened for them and later Jakob and the boys came out and talked with their fans. I was too tired to go and talk with them. I slept between sets. Blues Traveler was a blur. I think I dreamt most of the concert. I actually fell asleep in the third row center, despite the fifteen foot tall amplifiers blaring out the rocking tunes.
The irony of this little episode in my own mental cruelty is that seven months later, I was standing in Canterbury Cathedral, above the spot where ArchBishop Thomas a’Becket was slain mistakenly by knights who were hoping to gain favor with King Henry II.
So I think I’ve earned another shot. And I might go for it, too, as long as Alex keeps his sexy new shorn look. Yummmm!!!!
