The Jeopardy! Experience
10. Things Unseen
Jeopardy! shows us there’s a price to be paid for asking the wrong questions, and answers go unseen unless we ask the right questions.
In the years following Lynn’s appearance on Jeopardy!, she occasionally told me things she’d seen and experienced as a contestant; things that go unseen by the rest of us mere mortals. These revelations from Lynn were precious to me and often came at the least expected times, like floating in a warm summer sea or, as you’ll read below, cleaning an empty house. If you’re lucky, what follows will be difficult or impossible to understand.
I imagine most people who appear on Jeopardy! are anxious to talk about their experiences. Not Lynn. She never ignored people when they asked specific questions after finding out she’d been on the show, but she downplayed the experience with “It’s just a game show.” Lynn had her reasons for keeping her experiences on Jeopardy! close to her. Adults who were abused as children are survivors. They learn skills that remain unseen by those of us lucky enough to grow up in non-abusive families. For a victim, things that are important to you, that become a part of you, need to be hidden from everyone. A victim knows that even their memories can be stolen and used against them. To survive, a victim wraps the only thing they truly own—their memories—tightly around the core of their being. The fact that Lynn volunteered to me some of her Jeopardy! memories was an outward sign of her trust in me, of her love for me.
Knowing some of the things unseen gives us a different perspective.
In 1992, at 10:30 AM on a very hot Tuesday morning, Glen, the assistant contestant coordinator, came out into the back alley of the Hollywood Center Studios, Stage 1, to welcome Lynn and the other 12 contestants to Jeopardy!. This wasn’t at all like what Lynn had imagined. She imagined a hotel-like lobby area, where brave contestants are led to a presentation center for orientation, with movie theater carpet, comfortable seats, and hallways decorated with framed art and historic photos from the show. In reality, the contestant waiting area was a back alley outside the studio, with no chairs and a bright blue-sky ceiling of infinite height. It was like an alley you’d find behind strip mall stores.
Lynn told me that before they finally went into the studio at that first official greeting, Glenn explained that from this moment on, they would need to be escorted by a contestant coordinator or someone from Standards and Practices until they left the studio that evening. “Pretend they’re not there, even when they follow you into the restrooms, Glenn told them. “No wandering off to explore,” he warned. “You can talk with the other contestants, but not to the crew. It’s important; you don’t want to get disqualified after getting this far, right?” And with that, from far down the alley on the other side of the studio gate, I watched the ‘jeopardy of contestants,’ like a single-file gaggle of goslings, follow Glenn through a tall gate with a turnstile of the sort you’d find at a sports stadium. I was so proud of Lynn; I could never have gotten a ticket to enter that arena.
A 'jeopardy of contestants'.
In 1994, we were moving into our second house in Wilmington, DE. We were anxious to leave the college town where we’d lived for 15 years and move to a community of fellow diurnal creatures. A few days before we moved into our still-empty new house, we were cleaning upstairs. Lynn took a break from sweeping and watched as I struggled to disassemble an old tubular wardrobe rack the previous owners had left behind. It was too big to get down the stairs fully assembled, and it was proving tricky to get apart. I guess that’s why it was left for the new owners. Lynn said, “That’s like the clothes rack they had at Jeopardy!”.
Lynn told me there were no dressing rooms, at least not for the contestants. The contestants changed in the restrooms. Glen brought them into a not-so-big break room with a fridge and microwave along one wall. There was an empty wardrobe rack in the far corner where the contestants could all hang their clothes (three days’ worth were required). One long Formica table was in the middle of the room, and kitchen-table chairs, complete with vinyl seat covers, were scattered around the table and placed along the walls. Lynn said it reminded her of the break room in the Townsends, Inc. chicken processing plant in Sussex County, Delaware, that she’d once toured on a school trip. “I guess that’s what happens to surveillance chickens when they retire,” She said.
That was funny, of course. I immediately knew what Lynn meant, but something would go unseen if we didn’t stop and think about the connections she was tying together and what they meant.
It was a happy moment cleaning out our new house and getting it ready so we could move in. Lynn tied the wardrobe rack I was taking apart to another happy time: the clothes rack in the Jeopardy! break room. She followed the breakroom’s thread to the chicken processing plant, whose thread, in turn, led to the surveillance chickens at the La Brea Tar Pits. Lynn’s life had taught her that joy is often balanced by sadness, danger, or even tragedy. The surveillance chickens live a happy, well-fed life—unless they become heroes and develop encephalitis. And if that honor eludes them, the possibility of a chicken processing plant looms in their future. For people and chickens, the future remains unseen. The difference is that people know there is a future, whereas chickens live entirely within a moment. I think most people try to live that way, enjoying the moment, and not always thinking about what’s unseen in the next moment. I’m more like the chickens: happy to live in successive moments of ignorant bliss. Lynn had learned that every moment could have consequences. Lynn needed to be prepared for those unseen repercussions, even if that meant tempering the joy, for her life had taught her that blindly living in the moment is often dangerous.