OK, so here is my saga of my trip to NYC. I found out several weeks ago that the “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” show was holding auditions for contestants in June. I e-mailed my registration info, and they sent me a confirmation that my audition was Monday June 19th at 6:30pm.

I left my house Monday morning at 0700 and drove to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Reception Center (AKA: the “airport”). After parking and waiting for two hours (why do they say to come 2hrs early? It’s a ploy to get you to buy stuff from the duty-free shops), I boarded the plane to LaGuardia. This was an Embraer jet with 50 seats. I’m not sure what model jet it was, but I think it was the “Sardine”. The fuselage was 8 feet wide. There was a seat on one side of the aisle, and two seats on the other side. There was one flight attendant and two pilots. I got to sit in seat 17F. There were 18 rows, and so I was next to the single toilet. I sat next to a lady who works for ATA. “Sat” is such a plain word, not very descriptive at all for the experience of being shoehorned into a space smaller than a port-a-potty with a total stranger. Thankfully, she was nice, and didn’t try to grab my butt (ha ha ha ha ha). So we flew to NYC. It took two hours. (twenty minutes longer than the promised 1:40).

Arriving in New York at 1pm, I went to the “ground transportation” section. The lady on the plane had advised me to not take a cab, but to buy a “MTA” ticket instead. I bought a ticket good for six total rides (on a bus or a subway) for $10. That lasted me for the entire trip, and I would have paid around $40 for each cab ride. Boy that lady sure saved me some money!

I rode the M60 bus to Aurora Ave, where I got off, boarded the subway (which was elevated, at this point. Hmmm. Not really sub anything), and rode two stops to Broadway. I had to walk about ten blocks to my Super 8 hotel (Would you walk 8 blocks to save $200? Obviously I did, for a cheaper hotel). Then, after changing into my “impress the millionaire staff” clothes, I walked back to the subway around 3pm. Then it took me about 2.5 hours to figure out how to get to the Upper West Side (where the ABC studios are located). That subway system is tricky to figure out if you don’t have anybody to help you. Speaking of which, one observation, New Yorkers….SMILE once in a while! For goodness sakes, if life is that bad that you can’t smile every now and then, maybe it’s time to move! Not one person smiled at me the whole time I was in New York (at least nobody that wasn’t taking my money, THEN they smiled). If I had spent more than a few days there, I think I may have started to hand out money just to get people to smile at me.

I got to the ABC studios, waited outside for a half hour, and then went inside with 50 other people. We all sat down at tables to take the test. It had thirty questions. Most of them were no problem for me. Here are a few examples:

*What state’s capital is named after our third President?
*What year did man land on the moon?
*Who put the bomp in the bomp-she-bomp-she-bomp?

OK, I made the last one up. There were several questions that I didn’t know the answer to, or at least wasn’t sure about. One was “what is a quahog?” The answers were: a clam, a flower, a vegetable, or a pig. I knew it wasn’t a pig, that’s too easy. My gut said clam, but I thought it had a better chance of being a vegetable, so I picked that. Yep, it’s a clam. More later, as I have a softball game to go to.