I was on Jeopardy! Mon., Mar. 22. This is my story.

Slash: The show taped in January, Slash was on our connecting flight from Dallas to LAX, returning from a ski trip with his family. Personally I think this is like saying you saw the Unknown Comic, but apparently he’s been making the rounds lately without his hair in his face, and my wife recognized him from Ellen.

The other auditioners were all really bad ass hipsters, a lot of us had auditioned for Survivor and The Bachelor. I believe the guy next to me had been the bassist for Smashmouth. No, I’m kidding. I was into math competitions when I was in junior high and I’d bet most everyone had been in a spelling bee or Odyssey of the Mind or what have you. There were at least two references to Dungeons and Dragons in the interviews.

Everyone who makes it to that round is technically on call for the next eighteen months. Obviously with my Orlando audition I never got called. After my April audition, I got a call in December. The show tapes Tuesdays and Wednesdays, five shows a day. You have to pay for your own trip, but third place wins $1,000, second place wins $2,000, and the winner gets to keep her total.

Studying: I studied a book of 100 operas and I studied the presidents, most of which I’ve forgotten. I can tell you that Strauss wrote Die Fledermaus” and Wilson’s VP was…actually, no, blanking.

Apprehension: My biggest fear was that I would freeze up. My first audition, here at the Mills House hotel, I could not remember Whitney Houston’s name, and at my second I blanked on Don Knotts. Forgetting Kevin Costner’s co-star from The Bodyguard I can live with, but being from Charlotte and not rememberingthe name of the man who played Barney Fife? You can’t go home again.

My other fear was sinking into the red and panicking like a man at the craps table who keeps asking for markers until they break your thumbs. I think it’s pretty cold that they don’t let you stick around for Final Jeopardy if you’re in the negative. I distinctly remember, early on in this version of the show, a woman was in the red and she asked if she could play anyway, and they let her. None of the producers remembered that.

The show tapes at Sony Picture Studios in Culver City, which is a nice town in West LA, not far from Venice Beach and Santa Monica. Sony was originally MGM, where The Wizard of Oz was filmed and the setting for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, which if you haven’t read at least the opening scene of, you should probably go do that now instead of reading this.

You’re in the green room for a couple hours the morning of the taping, they have pastries and coffee, do your make-up. The woman who did mine also did make-up for Dancing with the Stars and said Julianne Hough was a sweetheart. (Duh.) You don’t meet Alex until you actually are on the show, but the rehearsal is pretty useful. They take a couple hours to get you briefed on everything: what happens when they have to go back and make an adjustment, how you don’t have to say the first name of a person but they’d like it if you did, and so on

The set is not radically different from how it looks on TV. The contestants are actually reading the questions off the squares on the board, which is twenty yards away, which I’d think would be difficult for people without great eyesight.

The buzzer:  I did struggle getting the hang of the signaling device. It’s not so much a trick as a race, often all three of you know the answer and you’re racing to ring in first. When Alex stops talking, a producer pushes a button that turns on these little Christmas lights on the side of the board. Ring in before that and you’re locked out for a fraction of a second.

They encourage you to repeatedly mash the little green button. You’ll often see people still mashing it as someone else has rung in. That is because, yes, we want you to know we knew the answer, but also you can’t really tell if someone has rung in. You can see the back of those little timer lights in front of you but that’s about it.

A lot of the categories, like say Before and After, are more about quick figuring than knowledge, and you really have to be slick. You can’t always see those Christmas lights out of your periphery, so you’re trying to read the question to yourself faster than Alex does, figure out if you’re going to ring in, and either look for the lights or try and anticipate. It’s a little like trying to hit a baseball, with the guessing and timing of what’s coming.

Alex: Alex is a stand-up guy. He does only work two days a week but they’re long days, and the dude turns seventy this year. He looks amazing. I know some people think he acts like a know-it-all when of course he has the answers, but you wouldn’t want the host for a serious trivia show to be all: “Gee, whaddaya know, it’s Riley Marshall.” (Wilson’s VP. I googled it.)

Johnny Gilbert: This is the man who says “This     izzzz    Jeopardy!” He is 85 years old. His hair is a wide, gold and silver coif. He wears a sateen Jeopardy jacket and is in charge of keeping the audience warm . His voice is naturally electric like that. On one occasion he held up a commercial break to finish a story from his days as host of Supermaket Sweep, involving a woman’s sweatpants getting caught in the wheel of a shopping cart.

Overall: It went great. I’m pretty mortified to see what I look and sound like up there.

More celebrities: Lauren and I were there a week, saw Fran Drescher and Anna Trebunskaya (Dancing with the Stars). My wife got to tell Adam Sandler he deserved an Oscar nod for Funny People, and, at a coffee shop in Santa Monica, I saw Seymour Cassel, who has been in most of Wes Anderson’s movies (Max’s dad in Rushmore, a bellhop in The Royal Tenenbaums). It turns out Seymour Cassel’s son was a childhood friend of Saul Hudson. Saul was always in hurry, zipping around from one thing to another, and so Seymour was the man who give him his nickname: Slash.