I swear, I am not the kind of person who travels 500 miles to try out for a game show. Really, you’ve got to believe me on this. I don’t like crowds, I don’t like making small talk with strangers, and I usually don’t even like game shows.

I mean, Jeopardy is OK, but Wheel of Fortune and Hollywood Squares are like a video root canal. Due to circumstances beyond my control, I even have seen a few snatches of The Price is Right lately, and aside from the ever-more-android-like movements of the 107-year-old Bob Barker, the main thing that has changed is that the contestants increasingly resemble homeless people, except the homeless probably dress better.

But Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? is different. It’s prime time. Regis Philbin is a snappy dresser and seems to be a likable guy. The set design is cool, filled with shadows and lasers, and the music is spooky and suspenseful. Millionaire is easily the most popular game show in the history of television. Since beginning in Britain in 1998, it has spread worldwide. It’s aired in 40 more-or-less identically formatted versions in 56 countries—from India, where it is watched by more than 100 million people a night, to Russia, where, in some sort of inadvertent expression of national character, the audience gleefully tries to give the wrong answer to hapless contestants who use the “ask the audience” lifeline.

Since the show began airing in the U.S. in August 1999, it has become an American cultural phenomenon. Even as ABC risked oversaturation by scheduling it four times a week, the show continues to be among the top-rated programs on television. And I wanted to be a part of it. I told my wife Sharon what I wanted to do; her response was a good-natured “You’ve lost your mind.” At least I think it was good-natured.

Poise and sense of humor

So I was in a hotel lobby in New Orleans, waiting for the chance for a Millionaire audition. I was lined up with about 110 other potential contestants, and we were all waiting for the junior staffer who appeared to be in charge down here, a young woman in black satiny pants who had a striking resemblance to the pre-surgery Carny Wilson, to tell us what to do next.

It had been only eight days earlier when I sat down by the phone to try to get a slot at this tryout. The show began accepting audition calls at 6 p.m. on Friday, March 9. I began repeatedly dialing the number. I’d get a busy signal, hit flash, redial; get a busy signal, hit flash, redial. After something like 125 attempts, the phone finally rang on the other end.

A recorded Mr. Announcer-type voice walked me through the registration process. I had to pick a city—auditions were going on the next weekend in New Orleans and Chicago; I chose New Orleans. A breathy female recorded voice then assigned a seven-digit PIN, and Mr. Announcer came back to caution that without this identifying number, I wouldn’t be able to enter the audition. He also said that the audition would consist of a timed test of knowledge, followed by an interview and practice game during which we would-be millionaires would be judged on the basis of “poise, sense of humor, and TV presence.”

Dear God in heaven, I thought. It’s more like Who Wants to Be Miss America?

Toward the end of the call, Mr. Announcer revealed the Top Secret location: the Doubletree Hotel on Canal Street, with my session to begin at 2 p.m. It was suggested that I get there an hour ahead of time. So I’d booked a flight and a room at a cheap chain joint near the airport, and here I was. Here we all were. We lined up near the elevators in the small and sort of shopworn lobby, and naturally fell to talking while we waited. The people immediately in front of me, a couple in their 50s, were from Austin. Somebody said that geography was a weak area for her, but that she had been studying some maps.

“If I were to study one thing on a map, it would be the Great Lakes,” the man from Austin said. “That just comes up on the show over and over.” He seemed pretty intense about it.

A rumor spread that there was a guy in the hotel bar intently reading a couple of paperback reference books, getting in some last-minute cramming. We shook our heads at how far-gone somebody can get. We may have traveled hundreds of miles to try out for a game show, but we weren’t, you know, fanatics.

Near miss by phone

This audition was not the first time I had tried to get on Millionaire. The producers keep tweaking the qualification format, but for most of the show’s run, the only way to qualify was by phone. There is a first round of three questions that you play over the phone, and then a few people who pass that round are chosen at random and called back later for a second round of five phone questions. Fewer still who make it past this round are then randomly chosen for the show.

I had gotten past the first round about 20 times, but had been chosen for the next round only once. My five-question playoff was set for between 2 and 2:15 p.m. on a Wednesday afternoon in February.

I bought almanacs and tried to memorize historical facts and movie release dates. When the big day came, I nervously dialed the number I had been given, entered my secret password, and, with 10 seconds to answer each question, heard the automated voice read the first one: Arrange these four words to form the title of a popular nonfiction book: 1. God 2. Masks 3. Of 4. The. OK, I thought, easy enough: The Masks of God. I punched in 4231.

Question 2: Arrange these inventions or advances in their order of introduction, starting with the earliest: 1. Bayer aspirin 2. DVD 3. Calculus 4. Canned food. For a split second, I didn’t immediately understand what “DVD” meant, but thought of it in time. I was pretty sure calculus dated to ancient Greece, and I knew that there were canned foods in the mid-1800s, predating Bayer’s invention of aspirin. So: 3412.

Question 3: Arrange these television journalists in order of their birth, starting with the earliest: 1. Rivera 2. Soren 3. Couric 4. Brinkley. David Brinkley was clearly the oldest, Geraldo Rivera was obviously older than Katie Couric, and Tabitha Soren was the baby of the group. Easy question. 4132.

Question 4: Arrange these albums in the order of release, starting with the earliest: 1. N’Sync 2. Thriller 3. Piano Man 4. Rubber Soul. This question was a fastball over the heart of the plate for me. I punched in an easy 4321 and waited for the make-or-break question number 5.

Then it came: Arrange these U.S. senators in geographical order of the states they represent, starting in the east: 1. Clinton 2. Boxer 3. Daschle 4. Hatch.

As the question began, it seemed nicely bookended by Clinton of New York in the east and Boxer of California in the west. And Hatch was Utah, so I knew where that fit in. I knew Daschle’s first name was Tom, and that he was minority leader of the Senate, but I was blanking on where he was from. I quickly decided that there was a lot of real estate between New York and Utah, and hoped his state was in there somewhere. I punched in 1342.

The recorded voice told me to enter a phone number where I would be for the next four hours, saying that if I was selected for the show, I would be called. Then the call was over. I dove for an almanac, fumbled for the political section, and breathed a huge sigh of relief when I saw that Tom Daschle represents South Dakota, nicely situated between Clinton and Hatch.

I was pretty sure I had gotten them all. My co-workers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s News and Public Affairs Office had been waiting to hear how things had gone, and we carefully went over the questions and my answers.

We all agreed: five for five, baby.

I started getting excited. All that had to happen now was for the phone to ring. I knew that it was still a random drawing to select the 10 finalists for the show from among all of us who had gotten all five questions right. But I had done everything I could do; I had answered every question they threw at me. I just knew that phone was going to ring and that Sharon and I would be on that plane to New York the next week.

Didn’t happen. The phone didn’t ring, and I was back to square one. Bottom line: Answering the questions correctly in the time allotted is crucial, but luck is a huge factor. Like a gambler who was once oh-so-close to a mythical Big Score, I had the scent of winning, and I wanted another chance.

Millionaire has taken to supplementing the herds of contestants who qualify by phone with those chosen by audition. In the month of March alone, the show has held or scheduled auditions not only in New Orleans, but also in Chicago, San Diego, Miami, Philadelphia, and Dallas, with 10 more cities coming up. This may be an effort to overcome what some Millionaire viewers call the “white male nerd” factor. Doing face-to-face interviews may be a way for producers to find contestants who will bring more diversity to the show. At least that was my theory, and as a white male, I could use it as an excuse if I bombed out.

The Eddie Haskell factor

When Carny Wilson finally called us into the Doubletree’s meeting room, I scanned my fellow auditioners. Lots of women, but the crowd was still probably 55- or 60-percent male. Fair number of nerds. There were a couple of African American guys, but generally, even in this city that is 62-percent black, the contestant pool was 98-percent white.

I had naively thought that most of the competition here would be from New Orleans and that I would be among the few who traveled to take part, but I don’t think I talked to a resident of New Orleans that whole afternoon. There were a lot of people from Texas, some from elsewhere in Louisiana, some from Mississippi and Alabama, and then the odd Arkansan, Floridian, or Minnesotan who had made their way here as well.

A woman stood up front and introduced herself as Tracy and said she was one of the producers of Millionaire. She was probably in her late 20s, dressed all in black, and looked like a female version of John Cusack in Grosse Pointe Blank. In fact, Tracy looked more like John Cusack’s sister than his sister Joan does.

She gave us directions about completing the two-page application for the audition and then brought up her fellow staffer Sonny, who had short spiked hair, sideburns, and a belt buckle the size of a salad plate. Sonny ran through the legal requirements. For example, nobody could be an employee of ABC, Walt Disney, AT&T, and some other companies I’d never heard of. Also, a disclaimer basically said that the show’s producers could use our names and images any damn way they saw fit, and we couldn’t do a thing about it.

The application had the usual name-address-phone number type stuff on it, but also several Oprah-esque queries like, “If you could spend a day with any other person, living or dead, who would it be?” and “Is there something about you that makes you really stand out?” and the question that most often comes up when people find out you’re trying to get on Millionaire: “If you won, what would you do with the million dollars?”

I, of course, had thought about this question, but I wasn’t sure how to answer. Naturally, I thought it would be cool to win a bunch of money; it would give me major bragging rights at my next class reunion, and who wouldn’t want to be loosed from the surly bonds of mortgage payments? But at the same time, the answer was more complicated than that.

Last year, my wife Sharon and I traveled with a group of people from Nashville’s Belmont United Methodist Church to the African country of Zimbabwe, and among the work we did there was helping the women who take care of the children at an orphanage near the town of Mutare. There is a huge HIV infection rate in southern Africa, and many of the 40 children we hugged, played with, and fed were orphaned because of AIDS. Some of them were probably HIV-positive themselves. The people who work in this orphanage are among the most heroic people I’ve ever met, and I’d decided that if I won a lot of money, I would use some of it, somehow, to help the orphanage and its staff and children.

But I wasn’t sure I wanted to say all that, for several reasons. Reason One was the possibility of leaving the false impression that I was planning to use all of my theoretical winnings for charitable purposes, which (remember the mortgage?) was not true. Reason Two was the Eddie Haskell Factor, in which I didn’t want to appear to be setting myself up as wanting to win only for selfless reasons, in implied contrast to the other mercenary greedhead contestants. There was also a Reason Three in my mind, which was that Millionaire is an entertainment show, and I thought there was a strong possibility that the producers wouldn’t want a contestant to raise some downer topic like AIDS in Africa to distract everybody from the festivities.

In the end, I took a chance and opted for honesty. In what I wrote, I mentioned the orphanage. I figured if they didn’t want me to say that on the show, they could tell me to shut up about it or edit it out.

Test time

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?’s set may be loaded with lasers, computer screens, and other assorted gimcrackery, but the test the show gave at the audition was as low-tech as a high-school history test in 1975. It was given to us on two photocopied pages, and we were told to keep the test face down until everybody had a copy.

Tracy told us we would have 12 minutes to answer the 30 questions on the test. She said the test would have the same format as the phone qualifying and the fastest-finger round on the show—in other words, four items to put in order.

She checked the time and told us to start.

The first question was essentially a list of words to alphabetize, but things went downhill from there. Put the countries these leaders are from in order, starting at the United States and going east: Jean Chretien, Kim Dae Jong, Ariel Sharon, Jacques Chirac. Well, let’s see, I was pretty sure Chretien is the prime minister of Canada, Kim is Korea, Sharon is Israel, and Chirac is France, so that’s 1432.

Put these TV families in the order of the number of children they had, starting with the most: Bradys, Simpsons, Partridges, Camdens. OK, the Brady Bunch had six, Partridge Family had five, Simpsons have three, but who are the Camdens? Never heard of them. I figured that they were either the highest or the lowest, and guessed lowest: 1324.

Put these World War II events in order, starting with the earliest: Nazis invade Poland, Allies land on Iwo Jima, Allies liberate Paris, FDR starts the Lend-Lease program. I was pretty sure the landing on Iwo Jima came after the liberation of Paris, but did Lend-Lease start before the invasion of Poland, or vice versa? I guessed 1432 and moved on. Thirty questions in 12 minutes didn’t leave much time for dwelling on answers.

Tracy called time and had us pass our papers to the aisle—more déjà vû from high school—and she and the other show staffers disappeared to score them. We began nervously milling around, comparing notes with each other. I learned that the Camdens were from a show on WB called Seventh Heaven that I was only vaguely aware of, and that they have seven children. I had guessed wrong. I wondered how many other questions I had blown, and if, after all the trouble to get here, I was going to wash out now.

“If there had been questions on Star Trek, I would’ve gotten those,” somebody said. “There’s a lot of people on the show who aren’t very good trivia players,” somebody else said disdainfully, falling victim to the broadly held misconception that all the questions on Millionaire are “trivia questions.” Trivia—intimate knowledge about some subject, usually a pop-culture topic such as football, TV, or Elvis movies—is pretty useless. Some Millionaire questions are indeed trivia questions, including the one that contestant John Carpenter answered to become the first million-dollar winner: “Which president appeared on Laugh-In?” But there are some contestants who probably know Elvis’ shoe size, but go down in flames because they’ve never heard of Jane Austen. Trivia knowledge isn’t enough, but I wasn’t sure what was enough.

After more than an hour, which seemed like enough time for intelligent life to evolve from a wad of old bubble gum, Tracy, Sonny, and the other staffers came back. Tracy stepped to the front of the room and began reading the names of those who got to stay. I did. I was one step closer to Regis.

The ethics of chipmunk-stomping

The “nonpassers,” as they were graciously called, wished their new friends well and left. I looked around. Maybe 50 of us left—a little less than half of the original group. I didn’t get much time to contemplate this, because Tracy was at it again, this time reading off people who were to “play a mock game,” and my name was in the first group.

Four of us went up front and stood behind a table: two other guys, one about my age (early 40s), and one probably 10 years younger, along with a middle-aged woman with a walker. Carny Wilson took a Polaroid of each of us to attach to our applications. On the table where we stood were four black bicycle-handlegrip-type devices wired to lights and buzzers, and we were told to push the button in the end when we wanted to respond to a question. Sonny and Tracy sat in the front row, and another staff person, a young woman with blond hair, read questions off index cards, while another staffer took notes.

“The movie Gone in 60 Seconds was about a group of thieves who stole what?”

I pushed the button, and to my surprise, the light in front of me went on.

“Wayne?”

“Cars,” I said.

“That’s right,” she said with a big smile. I felt absurdly happy at having gotten correct a question that many people currently in comas could have answered.

But it soon became apparent that the purpose of having us up there was not to answer questions in the game sense, but answer questions in the interview sense. This, it turned out, was the “poise and sense of humor” part.

Sonny and Tracy were armed with the applications we had completed earlier and began firing questions at us by name. Some of them were based on something in the application, while others were intended just to catch us off guard and gauge our reaction.

“If you were a car, what kind would you be?”

“If you could ask Regis three questions, what would they be?”

Referring to the application of the man to my left, Sonny said, “So, Jim, tell us about the time you were arrested for skinny-dipping with your girlfriend.” This led Jim, a tall, balding, nervous man, into the labyrinth of an endless anecdote that, indeed, eventually culminated in an arrest for skinny-dipping. Somehow it was both salacious and boring. I tried to keep an interested look on my face, but my thought was that Jim wasn’t doing himself any good with his rendition of this story. I had begun to empathize with my fellow auditioners so much at this point that I took no joy from this thought.

And then suddenly I was brought back by Sonny quickly asking, “So, Wayne, would you stomp on a chipmunk for a million dollars?” I did a split-second moral calculation—African orphans vs. a quick death for a rodent.

“Sure,” I said, feeling like I’d tumbled down a rabbit hole. I had the sense that the way I answered the chipmunk-stomping question was more important to my qualifying for the show than whether I knew anything about the Camdens or Iwo Jima.

After I sat back down, the other remaining auditioners came up, four by four, and endured a similar treatment. There would be an occasional factual question interspersed among the “What’s your greatest guilty pleasure?” or “What would your worst enemy say about you?” In a way, I thought it was unfair that my group had gone first with no idea of what to expect; at least these later people would have time to decide what kind of car they would be.

But since I had already had my turn, I could devote full attention to how the others were doing. There was a guy who told a story about flat-lining, then coming back from the dead during surgery. He said if he won, he would give some of his winnings to diabetes research. There was an undergraduate who talked about his mom raising him alone after his father had died, all while putting herself through nursing school. If he won the money, he said, he would use it for medical school. A peppy mom talked about her Down syndrome daughter’s fondness for imitating Regis while the show is on.

A Billie Jean King doppelganger said, half-jokingly, that she was unemployed and that now her career plan was “trying out for game shows.” There was an almost painfully shy college student who quietly and earnestly answered that her worst enemy would say “that I’m stuck up because I’m shy, and some people just think I’m stuck up until they get to know me.” A tall, smiling, outgoing Hispanic guy from Miami, a teacher, jokingly gave part of his answer in Spanish. (He’s in, I thought.) A surly guy who introduced himself as a former disgruntled postal worker who had quit the post office because of his disgust with office politics announced with anger that Greenspan had turned his back on him and that he was going broke day-trading. (He’s out, I thought.)

And then it was over. Everybody had auditioned, and Tracy said the show would send postcards to those of us who passed the audition, adding them to a pool of people who could be called at any time as contestants. If we didn’t get a postcard in the next few weeks, we were free to continue trying to qualify over the phone, or we could come to another audition and try again.

There was a letdown in the room. We had known from the beginning that it was unlikely anybody would be told at the audition that they were Millionaire-bound, but the way everything just petered out didn’t seem right either.

I took the elevator back to the lobby. The afternoon was gone, and as darkness settled over New Orleans a steady rain began to fall. My plan had been to walk around the French Quarter and maybe get some dinner, but I didn’t have an umbrella and I wasn’t hungry. So I took a cab back to the hotel.

I called Sharon and ran over the events of the audition with her. Could I have answered better some of the questions on the application or from the staff? Yeah, probably, but I decided I did the best I could at the time. At least I hadn’t launched into a long pointless anecdote, told a dirty joke, or seemed potentially dangerous. How much did the written test count for? They didn’t say. They didn’t even tell us the right answers, the passing score, or how we did in comparison to the “class.” The truth is, after taking a weekend, traveling 500 miles, and spending five hours at an audition, I really have no idea if I’m any closer to contestanthood than when I started.

But, you know, I can see it in my mind. I could be sitting in the hot seat, all lifelines gone, playing the million-dollar question, and there it would be:

“On the cover of a 1969 album, the Beatles are shown walking across what street?” A. Penny Lane, B. Menlove Avenue, C. Abbey Road, D. Savile Row. And I take a delicious pause, smile to myself, and say to Regis, “Abbey Road. Final answer.”

Hope. There is always hope.