A few weeks ago - October 20th, in fact - I got the call to appear as a contestant on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. (For those of you who don't remember the show, here you go.) I was called to show up two Thursdays ago, November 8th.
I woke up at 5:30 to prepare for my 7:30 arrival to the ABC studios on the West Side (across the street from the Macaulay Building. I had set up multiple reminders to wake me up - my usual clock radio, my cell phone (which I gave a full charge the night before, so the battery wouldn't die while I was sleeping), and a call from my mother, all within about 15 minutes. I walked to the R train, changed to the 1, and went to Starbucks for breakfast (My thought process for that was, if I'm going to play for a million bucks, I might as well eat well.)
The morning portion of the day moved very quickly and covered quite a bit - discussions with the producers and assistant producers (including a delightful discussion with the assistant producer assigned to me, Shane, in which we discussed unicorns), a walk-through on the set (which is actually really small), a taking of my picture for the show, and pep talks and information from the executive producer of the show, along with the publicist and the lawyer.
After that's getting to game play, right? Wrong. We all had makeup done (the first time I've ever worn makeup) and had lunch (they had some great roast beef sandwiches - I think I had four).
And then came the holdover contestants from the day before! Six in all, to go along with the seven people, including myself. They being holdovers, they had priority in terms of getting to play first, so I had to wait, and wait, and wait...
...And then the day was over. Seriously, all I did on Thursday was wait to play, and I didn't get to play. I didn't get to do much while waiting - just eat, and talk, and pace the floor. Couldn't do reading because it was trivia. Crosswords? Ditto. We couldn't have anything in our pockets because it could contain facts.
So I ended Thursday annoyed and exhausted, but also sort of ready to come back on Monday. (You can read about Monday on my blog on Friday.)
I should note, by the way, that Betsy and her husband were in the audience on Thursday, which was cool, because they got to meet my aunt and grandmother, who were in from San Diego the last couple of weeks.
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The last couple of weeks have gone pretty well, too. On Thursday, I went to a Meet the Artist event, a poetry reading, which was quite interesting. There were four different poets who read some of their works, which provided a lot of really great styles of writing and performance to the table. Probably the best of the night, in my opinion, was Latasha Nevada-Diggs, who had a series of performances which were supplemented by multimedia presentations beside her. On Friday, I got my second Take-Home essay back for Expository Writing, and got an A-. (So far it's been, A, A-, A- - not bad at all.) My draft for my paper for the Dreyfus Affair class (a comparison of Edouard Drumont to Glenn Beck) went over well with my partner on Friday, as well.
On Saturday evening I went to the Quidditch World Cup, seeing four games, a scrimmage, a break-dancing performance, and a scrimmage that sort of devolved into a dodgeball game. Yesterday, fellow MacBlogger Danielle Gold and I went to CUNY FoodFest, a day-long discussion of food justice and sustainability. I learned quite a bit from the panel discussions, cooking lesson, film screenings and even the opening puppet show, and Danielle and I ate pretty well that day, too (the butternut squash soup my group made was pretty great, I must say).
Tonight was and is mainly grocery shopping and homework. Tomorrow after class I'm going to Cold Stone Creamery for their sampling of eight-layer ice cream cake. On Wednesday I get to go to the Metropolitan Opera for Arts in New York to see Cosi Fan Tutti; Friday, I'm heading back to Townsend Harris to judge the first night of SING!, and Saturday I'm going to a BargeMusic concert in Brooklyn and to the Brookdale trip to see the seventh Harry Potter movie! It should be a really great week in store for me!
Oh, and here's my first entry in the Macaulay Vlog.
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