I dreamed I was on Jeopardy! last night. It was a dream about being unprepared. Throughout the entire dream I was asking people for things, for paper, for pens, I was wearing shorts, I forgot about my retainer, I didn't have a mask (neither did anyone else, and I realized it was a television set so people didn't wear masks). The other contestant was a young woman who looked quite a bit like the main character in The Queen's Gambit and similarly had her shit together. At one point, as I was looking for something, she looked up from her phone and said "The Falconworks website is confusing" and I realized she had been googling me. I hadn't thought to google her. It was that kind of dream.
Alex Trebek was there. I talked to him twice. He had a man-bun in one of our conversations, which seems pretty unlikely; it was that sort of dream, too.
I suppose I might have had this dream because Alex's last appearance as the host of Jeopardy!, taped before his recent death, airs this week. I hadn't been consciously aware of that, though. I woke up and wrote my dream down. As I was writing I thought, again as I have recently, about the ways Alex Trebek and I crossed paths throughout my life. Not quite crossed; I never actually met the man. But he would enter my consciousness in some salient way every so often. It might be a little strange. But, you know, I can be a little strange. My mom once said I was the only kid she ever met who didn't like ice cream. (I did, in fact, like ice cream, especially French vanilla, but I didn't like the way it made me thirsty, and there was never an option to get a drink afterward. I am making up for it at probably the worst time.)
What I also liked as a kid was game shows. They fascinated me. They still do, I suppose, although I don't watch them the way I did as a kid, which is to say at every opportunity. The Joker's Wild, The Price is Right, Press Your Luck (man, do I love the Press Your Luck story from This American Life). Password. Concentration was pretty boring. Wheel of Fortune was also pretty boring; Merv Griffin supposedly once said that the secret to Wheel of Fortune was that 90 percent of the audience could guess the puzzle before the contestants do, and I think I saw through that at the age of nine. Jeopardy! was the best of them. Art Fleming, the original host, had an incredible panache as he would run the game through its paces: "The answer is...!" he would declare after a contestant chose a clue. It disappeared after a while; not enough glitz for the seventies, or maybe too brainy for the midday crowd. Ninety percent of the audience couldn't guess the clues.
Then they announced they were bringing it back, with Alex Trebek as the host. I was excited and disappointed. Alex had been the host of a couple other shows on the "meh" list. He was a retread, generic game show host #4. And he was easily mocked in the early going. My sophomore year at Kenyon we would gather in the dorm lounge after dinner each evening for half an hour of Jeopardy! and between shouting out answers - or technically questions - we would ridicule his French accent, his occasional supercilious tone when a contestant guessed wildly wrong, his general air of being the smartest guy in the room when we all knew he was a second-rate talent getting his last chance. He was an easy target for college students. We in the lounge among us actually knew French and African geography and had read the whole of Shakespeare's sonnets. We were twenty and we knew everything. We used to speculate on his conversations with contestants after the show, as the credits were rolling. "And then I was on High Rollers," we imagined he would remark, the three poor souls trapped behind their podiums nodding and smiling lest they not receive a lifetime supply of Creamettes.
I left college; Alex left my life for a while. Then he came back to me. Against my instructions, my parents bought me a television, and living alone in Southern California, I almost certainly would turn to "Jeopardy!" to fill half an hour of my evenings. I don't really remember any details of that. What I do remember was an instance of the Los Angeles Times' "Hot Properties" column, which profiled the houses being purchased by celebrities. Alex and his wife had bought a house in the Hollywood Hills, as one does if one is a prominent game show star (or "host," as he used to insist). He talked about how appealing the house was for "young couples" like them. He would have been about 50 at that point. I was 25 and applying the word "young" to himself seemed ridiculous to me. Then again, I'm 55 now and it still does.
More significantly, my friend and former high-school English teacher Lance qualified as a contestant, and came over to Los Angeles for a taping. We met outside the Sunset Las Palmas Studios; Lance disappeared backstage and his wife Judy and I went to the back row where friends and family were placed, so that we couldn't relay answers with winks or flashcards or semaphore flags or whatever they imagined we might use. I think Alex came out to warm up the audience, maybe take a few questions. I could still see through the veneer, even as the rest of the audience were totally charmed by his combination of elegance - he really did know how to wear a suit - and approachability. He had sincere charm, and he had charming sincerity. Then he went backstage to do his job.
They taped the shows "as if live"; that is, if the show lasted 28 minutes beginning to end, they took 28 minutes to tape it, pausing the action for the exact length of the commercial breaks and striking up the theme music as the breaks ended. Or nearly. They could pause and re-tape a moment if needed; not contestants answering questions of course, but an intro that got bungled or a clue that Alex had mispronounced. They did that once or twice. More memorably, there was a moment when there was a doubt as to whether a contestant had actually given an acceptable response to a clue, but not the answer the hosts were looking for. After the round, they paused to reconsider it. The judges deliberated a while. "The judges" - such a grandiose term. They were probably two producers and a lawyer, the producers trying to keep the audience happy and the lawyer making sure they wouldn't get sued. They deliberated more. Finally Alex expressed exasperation. "The audience expects us to get this right!" Applause. He might have been exasperated; it might have been schtick. The audience wasn't fussed about which.
Lance racked up a pile of virtual money but took second, which meant, as far as I know, it didn't become real money, just the home version of the game and possibly some Rice-a-Roni. Sic transit gloria mundi and all that.
We had lunch, parted, I watched the episode when it aired. I got older, I got busier, I got married. I would still watch Jeopardy! when I thought of it, when I was home from work in time.
Then I read about upcoming online tests to be a contestant. I had actually tried this once before, in person, back at the Sunset Las Palmas studios, when I was still in Southern California. "If Lance can do it, I can," I thought, not realizing - setting aside the probability of Lance's greater intellect - that there's a significant advantage to age in Jeopardy! You live through things other people learned in history class, if their American history class even managed to get past WW2. You pick up stuff. You see a lot more movies and hear a lot more songs. And the audience probably skews older, so the pop culture references do, too. We had taken a written test and were waiting outside, comparing experiences. I mentioned a question where I'd drawn a blank and guessed wildly. My counterpart was almost angry at my youthful ignorance. "Valentino was an actor!" he shouted at me. I took some pleasure in seeing him dispatched from further consideration the same as I was.
The online test was if anything more nerve wracking. Filling out 50 or 100 answers on paper, you at least had the chance to skip and maybe come back to one that was just escaping your grasp. Online, the time counted down, the question vanished, and along with it the chance to answer. I finished demoralized. It turned out I shouldn't have been. Some weeks later I got an email inviting me to the Waldorf-Astoria for an in-person tryout.
I won't describe that experience blow-by-blow. We were sworn to secrecy about the whole process. I actually don't care about that, at this point, but in fact I wrote a whole piece about it at the time and I'll try to dig that up if anyone is interested. Suffice it to say it was one of the most fun afternoons I can remember. And of course it gave me another chance to cross paths with Alex. Not in person; he was by that point a legitimately big enough star that he didn't have to cross the country doing contestant searches. But they had a big screen at the front of the room, and as we prepared to take our second exams, to confirm the results of the online one, Alex's face appeared, welcoming us in his friendly but serious manner, like that teacher who was both your favorite and your most demanding, Mr. Chips or something. And then he read the questions (answers) to us and we madly scribbled down answers (questions, although I don't think we had to phrase our responses in question form).
The age advantage proved true; I nailed the test. At least I felt that way, they never told us the results. Then we had to play a simulated game in front of everyone, including a mock interview. No Alex for this part of the audition, just a producer and a casting person, peppering us with questions. Somewhere along the way, I didn't nail that bit. They sent us on our way, telling us we might hear from them, we might not. They wouldn't tell us if we'd made the cut or were on the waitlist, how many of us would be called or how long we might wait. I waited. The call never came. I was disappointed, but honestly spending three hours seeing how the sausage was made was a pretty good consolation prize.
Not because of this, or at least not that I can remember, I watched Jeopardy! a bit less over time. Netflix came along and we dropped cable, and only deployed the rabbit ears for special occasions like the World Series. I went back to regular work that kept me from getting home 'til late in the evening. I kinda forgot about Alex for the most part. Once I was at my folks' house back in Ohio and after the evening news the familar refrain, "This. Is. Jeopardy!" rang out. I felt a momentary delight.
"Ugh!" said my dad. My mom grabbed the remote. "You don't want to watch Jeopardy!?" I said, incredulous.
(Pause for a moment here to observe the reverse-interrobang in the previous sentence.)
"No!" was the response. That was that. I went into a brief Alex withdrawal.
And then, again, I kinda forgot about him, until the news came of his cancer, then remission, then a relapse. It was, it is, pretty heartbreaking. Not for myself, for the most part. I did - I do - feel a little pang of loss. After a distant miss and then a nearer miss, I still imagined I would be standing at the podium some day, chatting with him about coaching little league baseball and his days on The Wizard of Odds.
More, perhaps, it's the feeling of getting older. Life goes on and we discover we can't plop on the lounge sofa and watch Jeopardy! four or five nights a week. Sic transit, too, those glorious Monday evenings, when time was endless.
And still more, the end of, in its minor way, an era. The tributes written before and after Alex Trebek's death have been lovely and heartfelt and spoke of the connection he forged, over the airwaves, with the audience, and audience who would carve out a part of their California vacation to see him in person, applaud in the way they couldn't from home. The connection was bogus, show biz, of course. Or maybe it wasn't, who am I to say?
I read some of those tributes and they all referred to the way he would practice French words, the way he would handle the contestants, especially when they would blow an easy clue, his insistence on being the "host," not the "star," because a star is distant whereas your host is your friend. They talked about his charming sincerity.
I hope that's all true. I honestly think it is, or at least I choose to. And yet, in reading the descriptions of how Alex went about his work and his career, I saw a different quality.
Alex Trebek was a professional. He thought seriously about his role, about how to do it well, and he worked at it. It's not easy to convey a sense that you're the most knowledgeable man in the room when everyone knows you've got both the answers and the questions. It's not easy to be Mr. Chips. Hell, it's not easy to look that good in a suit (although having a wardrobe department and Armani as a sponsor probably helps.)
It wasn't about art, and I don't think he had any delusions about that. You can find interviews where he talks about wanting the show to do well, "because if we do well, then I do well."
I don't know what he was like to work with. He might have been a diva, although that's certainly not what you read. I would believe he didn't suffer fools. He almost certainly didn't suffer amateurs. Well: I've spent enough time in a little corner of show business to know what a gift it is to be around a stage with someone who walks in the door ready to work, capable and prepared and expecting you to be the same.
I don't have a finishing note here. I won't be watching Alex's final show tonight: no cable or rabbit ears here. I might be a little disappointed by that, but in truth making a special point of seeing it, when I haven't been watching in recent years, seems like it would be a little silly. It was my good fortune that my path neared his a few times.