ovember rolled around, and I arrived in Los Angeles. Well, actually, I was in Compton, staying with my grandmother. She spent her evenings watching Cops and America's Most Wanted as I watched Blade Runner unfolding outside her window. Mom was there, too, to protect and chauffeur her "darling cash cow," as she had taken to calling me. When the fifteenth rolled around, Mom accompanied me to the Hollywood Center Studios. Behind high brick walls and cyclone fences, sheltered from the desiccated remains along Santa Monica Boulevard, lay the home of Jeopardy! and its inbred cousin, Wheel of Fortune. (The shows have since moved to the more antiseptic surroundings of Culver City.)

The gates at the studio opened at 3 p.m. to let potential contestants file in. Family members were deferred to some far off room as the students were led to a building two minutes away. We entered the studio and saw the Jeopardy! set. The big white letters were there, as were the video screens and the contestant podiums. But what stuck out was that it looked so diminutive compared to its appearance on TV as a looming Valhalla for the intelligentsia. In reality, it was the home game on steroids.

We were shepherded to the studio audience bleachers and addressed by a lissome contestant coordinator whose name escapes me. Let's call her Lisa. She explained the preliminary test: fifty questions from fifty different categories, all $600- 1000 questions (Jeopard-ese for ball-busting hard). We had ten seconds to answer each question on a piece of paper. People who passed would then participate in a mock game; everyone else would go home. Simple enough. But when questions were taken from the students, I began to smell a rat.

Someone asked, "So how many people are trying out?"

Lisa said, "Around the country, about 2000."

"And how many will get into the tournament?"

"Fifteen."

A collective mutter of "Jesus Christ!" went up.

Another student asked, "How many do we have to get right to move on?"

"A lot," Lisa said, coyly.

"Can't you tell us?"

"'fraid not."

"Do you grade on a curve?" was another query.

"No."

"Do we find out how many we got right?"

The answer, as before, was terse and negative. "No." Sensing a surly stirring in the crowd, she said cheerily, "Well, let's start the test now, shall we? Good luck, everybody!"