{"id":1135,"date":"2020-11-08T20:24:32","date_gmt":"2020-11-09T01:24:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/?p=1135"},"modified":"2020-11-10T10:02:58","modified_gmt":"2020-11-10T15:02:58","slug":"a-he-was-a-canadian-american-icon-who-will-be-sorely-missed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/a-he-was-a-canadian-american-icon-who-will-be-sorely-missed\/","title":{"rendered":"A: He Was a Canadian-American Icon Who Will Be Sorely Missed"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
One legend and one nervous dork.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So just when the presidential election had finally been called for Joe Biden and I thought I might go an entire day without getting weepy and emotional, I saw the headline I\u2019d been dreading for more than a year: Jeopardy\u2019s<\/i> Alex Trebek finally lost his battle with pancreatic cancer. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

2020 has been a tough year for the fixtures of my \u201880s teenhood. Eddie Van Halen\u2019s loss<\/a> was a terrible shock. And yet Alex Trebek\u2019s death, expected though it was, hit me even harder.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My parents were glued to the Jeopardy<\/i> reboot from the very first airing in 1984. Back in high school, I wasn\u2019t ever considered terribly smart, but it turned out I had a good brain for trivia and so I\u2019d follow along with the show. And my family took this seriously<\/i>. We didn\u2019t just watch; we\u2019d sit in the living room with pads of paper and pencils and award ourselves any clues we answered correctly. My dad always won Living Room Jeopardy, although he was duly impressed whenever I got a clue he didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

And even though Jeopardy<\/i>\u2019s seen a few changes over the years\u2014the increased dollar values, the end of the \u201cfive wins and out\u201d era, the resulting rise of superchampions\u00a0like Ken Jennings and Jeopardy James Holzhauer, and ever-changing sets and intros\u2014the core of the show has never deviated much from what it was when I watched every night with my parents.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And Alex Trebek grew to be a stable, reassuring presence as the years passed. My dad died when I was a freshman in college. We left my childhood home after I graduated. I moved around aimlessly between a few jobs and a few social scenes in my early 20s, trying to find a place for myself. But if I happened to turn on WJLA at 7:30 on a weeknight, Alex would always be there, always reminding everyone to answer in the form of a question.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And I’m\u00a0proud and grateful that I got to play a tiny part in this pop culture phenomenon\u00a0when I appeared on the show in 2011. After reading Ken Jennings\u2019s Brainiac <\/i>(a book I highly recommend), I was inspired to take the online test. I made it to two in-person auditions and got The Call after the second one.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

At the taping, I didn\u2019t get to see Alex much more than what you see of him on TV; he didn\u2019t emerge on stage until Johnny Gilbert announced him, and after each episode he\u2019d disappear back into his dressing room until the\u00a0next\u00a0taping. Jeopardy<\/i> tapes a week\u2019s worth of shows in one day, so any contestants not called for an episode sat in the audience until it was our turn to go.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Something you don\u2019t see on TV is the prep Alex did as the tapings started. He reviewed the clues before each game and even flagged a couple of incorrect answers. He wasn’t particularly demonstrative or outgoing like the friendly, huggy Californians on the staff, but he was polite and professional.\u00a0He maintained easy banter during audience Q&A sessions and remained unruffled even when one of the contestants fainted right before Final Jeopardy.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And it\u2019s worth mentioning that the summer before my episode taped, he\u2019d chased a burglar out of his hotel room (at the age of 71), injured his foot, and had achilles tendon surgery. One of my opponents thought\u00a0to ask him how his foot was doing during the post-game chit chat.<\/p>\n

His recovery was taking a lot longer than it would have when he was younger, he said. He followed that up with \u201cThere\u2019s nothing good about getting old.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I wish I had a more inspiring Trebek line to share, but that\u2019s what I got.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The one bit of solace I have today is that in the last year and a half since his diagnosis, I think Alex came to fully understand\u00a0just how much he meant to so many people. I read in more than one article that his work on Jeopardy<\/i> kept him going on days when he was feeling really terrible. I hope it did.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And while I\u2019m sure\u00a0Jeopardy<\/i> will endure, I do not<\/strong> envy the person who\u2019s taking over the host spot.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Rest well, Alex.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So just when the presidential election had finally been called for Joe Biden and I thought I might go an…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,33],"tags":[77,76,34],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1135"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1135"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1143,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1135\/revisions\/1143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}