For those of you who don’t know – I recently auditioned to be on Who Wants to Be A Millionaire? and this is my story of that adventure in my life. This is the first part. I was going to do it all as one post, but it got quite long!
Background
The journey actually began about a year ago when Chad Mosher, a friend and fellow game show junkie, went to New York to audition for WWTBAM and posted about his adventure on an about.com blog (Part 1 and Part 2). This started my thoughts of, “Hey, I could do that”. As I watched the past season of the show, I kept thinking about it and thought that if Chad goes to NY to audition again, I’ll go with him. Well his plans to go to NY didn’t work out about the same time that WWTBAM announced the road auditions and the one in Chicago, and Chad and I both immediately said we would go and tried to get others to join us on our road trip. No one else could make it with us, but the two of us went and was well worth it.
The Trip There
On Thursday, July 14, 2011, I got out of work at 2:30 p.m. and headed home and get everything packed up I needed to take and left for the Flint area to pick up Chad. He was ready for me when I got there and we turned around and hit the road for Chicago. Along the way we chatted, got to know each other a bit more, played some games of Millionaire on his iPod, and answered questions from Trivial Pursuit cards.
On the way there we decided it was time to stop for fuel for the car and fuel for us. The Speedway we stopped at was in limbo land. Standing at the gas station you could look one way and see “Welcome to Indiana” and the other way you saw “Welcome to Michigan” , so the only logical conclusion is that the station was between states! We then went to Wendy’s for dinner and I had a chicken sandwich and Chad had a Baconator.
We continued on our way navigating the freeways of Chicago and paying tolls as needed and being amused by the fact you can pay a 80 cent toll on a credit card (we didn’t, but we could have). My Google Nav also took us a strange way and there were detour signs, and I didn’t think I needed to follow the signs and my GPS, but since I didn’t know for sure, I just followed it and we got to the hotel somehow, although I’m still not sure exactly how we did. Who am I to question Google Nav and my Droid X?
We got to the hotel about 9:30 (CDT), got checked in with no problems and got settled in our room. We watched some TV, checked email and Facebook, and settled in for the night and to rest up for the big day.
Morning of the Audition
Our alarm went off at 6:00 a.m. and we were both already partially up since neither of us slept all that well for some reason. We got ready enough to go down and have some breakfast, where we didn’t eat too much since I was a bit nervous and the waffle maker destroyed Chad’s waffle! We went back to our room to finish getting ready for the day and pack up all of our stuff. While we were getting ready we saw a story on the local news about the audition process and were a little nervous about how many people were in line already, but figured we wouldn’t have any problems. (We also say a story on the Exxxotica Expo and thought that was very strange to have on for the 6:00 morning news, but found it “interesting” at least.) After we were ready we headed out to go to the auditions about 7:30 a.m.
Getting to and Getting into the Auditions
Driving to the audition Chad made sure I knew what to expect, some tips for what to do and not do, and answering any other questions I had. We got to the audition location (The Arlington Park Racetrack) and saw the line of people from which we determined it wasn’t too bad and should be in the next group to audition or at the worst the one after that. We finally found a place to park and joined the line of Millionaire hopefuls. We are standing in line chatting, sharing bits of random trivia that we know (you never know what will be on the test!), and then I hear something about @ChadMosher in the distance. I listen again and sure enough there is a WWTBAM person asking if there is an @ChadMosher in line, and so I’m pulling Chad to the side of the line and pointing him out. He is wondering what I’m doing since he said to not draw much attention to ourselves and especially him having been on other game shows before.
The production person comes over to us and tells Chad that they have been following our adventures on Twitter the whole way and he was being brought up to the front of the line, so Chad heads up and I’m still in line and we are both thinking “But wait – we are together”, well before Chad or I could say or do anything she also asked for @ChadMosher’s friend, @cmumathwhiz and thus I got to go up as well. We are both confused and amazed at the same time, finding it a bit surreal that the show production/audition staff were following our adventures on Twitter and were being brought up in line because of that. The production people told the others in line if they started tweeting pictures of them in line they had a chance to be brought up front as well. We are brought to the front of the line we were in and we started to stop but they told us to keep coming and then we see another line so we get to the front of that line and they start going into the building, so we go in and I finally think “OK, we are going to be put in this line so we’ll be sure to get into the next session”, but nope – we get brought to the very front of the line – in front of everyone else waiting, all because of a few silly tweets we did! A few others got to the front of the line because of tweets and some because of a contest WGN did.
Once at the front of the line we got a WWTBAM magnet and pencil. We then waited and chatted with those around us talking about a wide variety of items including what to expect on the test, crocheting/knitting (one lady was knitting in line), theatre, Mackinac Island (and correcting him on the pronunciation) We then get lead from the line up some escalators, across another room, up another escalator to the testing room.