video games will rot your mind (Toastmasters speech #2)

Update:  

I was on Jeopardy in 1999. (Show #3316 - Monday, January 25, 1999) People always ask "What's Alex Trebek like?"

At the time, I was 23 years old.  I had watched the show almost nightly for years and tried out (unsuccessfully) for teen Jeopardy! and college Jeopardy! 

Over time, my impression of Trebek shifted from 'he's really smart!' to 'he's really condescending' to 'why is he so smug, especially to women?' 

As a college sophomore, I was making smalltalk with a male college professor in his 60s and he asked me -- "don't you think he's sexist?"  It's odd, but a comment from an older white male authority figure was what it took for my 18-year-old self to be able to put the icky feeling about Trebek's smug, smarmy manner into words and call it what it is: sexist.

All of that was in the back of my mind when I finally got selected for the show.  As a contestant, you also submit 4-5 blurbs about yourself that can be used for the contestant interview banter.  I was really surprised that the producers picked this blurb:

"I am full of apparent contradictions: I consider myself a feminist, yet I also subscribe to Martha Stewart Living." 

Alex said I could be both and I enthusiastically agreed. He asked how I planned to spend my winnings and I answered that I wanted to fund my graduate studies. He asked what I planned to study and I said second wave feminism. He abruptly turned and moved on to the next contestant.  My boyfriend commented later that Alex couldn't get away from me fast enough.

I had one other moment with him that I considered odd -- the smalltalk at the end. He shut me out of the conversations, focusing all of his comments on my two male competitors until he turned to me and made an odd comment about a question in the Double jeopardy! round -- how was it that I knew what a rod and piston were and that I beat two other contestants -- men -- to the buzzer on this question about an internal combustion engine?  

In a gas engine the connecting rods transfer the motion of these to the crankshaft  

Answer: "What are pistons?"

Before I could answer, the cameras stopped, the lights came up, and he walked away.

------------------------

Speech originally given on Dec. 23, 2004
Award: Best speaker

---

Jeopardy theme song (5 seconds)

My palms were sweating as I stood at the podium. The audience was a hushed blur to my left. The house lights, that moments ago had been blinding in their brightness, were now dark. As the music wound down in slow motion, I desperately gripped the pen and wrote my answer (in the form of a question, of course).

You see, I've always been pretty good at trivia. For some reason, there's a slot in my brain for the stuff. And when I was 23, I hit the trivia jackpot - I was a Jeopardy! contestant.

But let me tell you how I got there.

As a kid, I really wanted to play video games, but my mother said: "Video games will rot your mind." She was wrong, of course, but we wouldn't know that until years later. She didn't care if I read books, though. So I immersed myself in the worlds of Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson, Daniel Defoe, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. All that reading helped my vocabulary and would come in handy later in life.

The first time it paid off was in sixth grade. My teacher, Mr. Arlie Hubbard, had been a Marine in the Korean war. And once a month, the drill sergeant in him split the class into two teams, pulled out "the blue book," and asked us rapid-fire questions:
"Name the third planet from the sun."
"Which President wore dentures?"

For the first time, my classmates were actually cheering me on for being smart. There was another really smart person in the class: my arch-nemesis, Danny Padilla. He was just as smart as I was, but he downplayed it well enough to be the most popular kid in school. It was only a matter of time before he and I would go head to head in an all-out blue book battle.

Then it happened. One day, Mr. Hubbard took out the blue book, split the class in half, and we were off.
"Name the lowest place in North America."
"Where do the Norse gods live?"
On and on we went, Danny and I, one point separating his team and mine, until we reached a double overtime tiebreaker. It was our team's turn and Mr. Hubbard barked:
"How many sides has a hexagon?" I faltered and said "5?"
Mr. Hubbard said "no - team B- how many sides has a hexagon?"
Danny said "6" and Mr. Hubbard declared him the winner.

That night, I wandered into the living room after dinnerand saw that my parents were watching a show called "Jeopardy!" that was just like blue book, but for adults. I started watching it with them once or twice a week.

The habit continued into high school, and I was able to shout out more and more of the answers each year. One day, my mom suggested that I try out for the show. She sent in a postcard with my name on it and I was invited to audition for Teen Jeopardy in LA. I didn't make it.

Then, during my senior year in college, my friend David Radwin invited me to go and audition with him for college jeopardy. Neither of us made the cut.

Two years later, my boyfriend and I were watching Jeopardy when I commented that the regular game was so much easier than the college game. As if on cue, the television flashed a Web address for people interested in auditioning. A month later, we went to LA. We sat in the Jeopardy audience and took a written test.

This time, I was one of six people who passed the test. We played a mock game and did a one-minute interview, just like Alex does on the show. The hardest part was waiting for the question to be read and not blurting out the answers. I filled out a form and they said "don't call us, we'll call you."

I got the call three weeks later. After going through hair and make-up, I walked onto the stage with two guys. The uber-geek looked about 35 years old. The other one looked about 28 years old. I was feeling pretty nervous, and the contestant wranglers reviewed the rules with us:

Rule #1: The show is taped in real time, so there will be starts and stops.
Rule #2: Wait until Alex finishes reading the question before hitting the buzzer. If we didn't wait, we'd get locked out for one second, which was bad because there are only two seconds from the time he finishes reading to when the timeout buzzer rings.

We practiced with the buzzers, but both of the guys kept beating me to the punch. I suspected their mothers had let them play video games as kids.

By the time tape rolled, I was calm and ready to play.

At the first commercial break, Alex reported the scores and announced "And Happy is Happy because she was as much money as her two opponents combined." We continued in single Jeopardy and I even got the daily double right. I finished that round pretty strong, and then we cut to a commercial break.

In double jeopardy, I couldn't beat the guys on the buzzer and they caught up with me. It was anyone's game going into final jeopardy. But in final jeopardy, there is no buzzer, it's do or die. And I had the distinct feeling I would die when I saw "Crime Writers" as the category for final jeopardy.

I thought about my dad's advice to bet everything but a dollar, realized that I had nothing to lose, and did it. Then, we cut to a break.

We were back in a blink of an eye. The answer was displayed and the music started to play. I wracked my brain, but I couldn't think of the either of the names of the two women authors who were in the House of Lords in 1998.

Jeopardy theme (2 seconds). I scribbled my answer and then the game ended. One of the other guys got it right and then the game was over, and I was shaking hands with Alex and the other contestants.

When the show aired on Jan. 25, 1999, my mom called to say that she had just gotten a call from Mr. Hubbard, asking if that was the same Happy who'd been his blue book champion all those years ago.

I thought of the blue book and Danny Padilla and just didn't have the heart to tell my mother that things might have been different if she had let me play those video games, after all.