She didn’t expect to even make it onto the show, but Kara Keenan of Sweet Home walked away $32,000 richer after playing ABC’s Who Wants to be a Millionaire.
Keenan, 31, appeared on the TV show Friday night.
Fighting sleep deprivation, slight illness, a three-hour time change, nervousness and the details of appearing on camera, Keenan made it to the hot seat across from host Regis Philbin.
Keenan made her way through the fastest finger contest where she had to put four duets in the order they appeared. From there, she worked through several questions to guarantee herself the $32,000.
Keenan said she could have pointed to the answer to her $64,000 question had she had a spider. She was asked to name the part of a spider’s body that includes the organ that produces web-making silk.
Her answer came down to two possibilities after using a 50-50 lifeline to attempt to get rid of one of the two possible answers. The 50-50 didn’t change anything, and she was still left to choose between the abdomen and the thorax.
She said she knew exactly which part of the body it was, could have pointed to it, but she couldn’t remember what it was called. Her final answer was the abdomen. The correct answer was the thorax.
“If they had said the spider’s tukhis, I would’ve had it,” Keenan said. “Basically, I psyched myself out…. My tired, sleep-deprived mind said, ‘Just answer it.'”
What viewers see on the screen is just a small part of what each contestant is actually going through. Keenan took quite a bit of time on the question. When she asked for clarification, she spent several minutes thinking over the answer while the program’s crew provided the clarification. A technical problem after tape started rolling again put the game back on pause before she was finally able to answer.
Keenan was pretty sure she would have the right answer, so she didn’t use any further lifelines, planning to save them, especially her “phone a friend” Oregon State University professor, for tougher questions.
In Who Wants to be a Millionaire, contestants face off with each other and put items in some sort of order in a fastest-finger contest. The winner goes to the hot seat where they answer progressively more difficult questions, earning more money, up to $1 million, the more they answer correctly.
If an answer is wrong, contestants lose whatever money they had accumulated, but at several points during the game, called milestones, the money is safe and there is no risk in attempting to answer the next questions. Once Keenan hit the $32,000 mark, she couldn’t lose that money by missing the next question, worth $64,000.
Keenan is using her winnings, after taxes, to pay off her student loans. Keenan, a former copy editor for the Corvallis Gazette-Times is an office specialist in the OSU Chemistry Department. She has a bachelor’s degree in history and is taking post-graduate course and planning to pursue a post-graduate degree.
“Calling in, I didn’t expect to get on the show,” Keenan said. She wasn’t disappointed in her performance at all. She never expected to be sitting in the hot seat. “I was happy just to be there.”
Dealing with everything leading up to the show makes it “much harder” than answering the questions while watching it, Keenan said.
People have asked her what the set was like since her return from the show.
Keenan said the set was distracting. The floor of the set is made of plexi-glass, lights are flashing and the music is playing. The monitors with the questions all have a logo with the question and choices displayed. The fastest finger contest has four buttons for answering the questions, with a delete button and an okay button.
“They look like buttons off of Star Trek or something,” Keenan said.
When she completed the fastest-finger contest, Keenan was sure she had lost. She took extra time to double check the order of the duets, which included “Beauty and the Beast,” “Summer Nighs” from Grease, “The Boy is Mine,” and one other. She had believed that “Summer Nights” was really “Summer Time,” but fortunately put it in the right order anyway.
She took more than eight seconds to get the answers in order, but no one else got the answers at all.
“I was just astounded because I was the only one who got it right,” Keenan said.
That’s where the pre-taping practice came in. Keenan and other contestants practiced entering the fastest-finger seats and leaving them and moving to the hot seat. During the show, she had to keep her mind not only on the game but on the director as well. All around, technicians are at work, and a comedian is entertaining the audience during breaks in taping.
“Being on the set is a lot more distracting than you would imagine,” Keenan said. “That annoying music is playing while you’re on the set. It’s not just start laying the game. If it was just the game, it would be simple.”
The hot seat sits up high, Keenan said. Most contestants need a box to get into it, and it’s wobbly as well.
Keenan was exhausted after being up for most of two days. She had flown out of Eugene at 6 a.m. on March 20. That meant she had to be up by 4 a.m., and she didn’t really get any sleep that night.
After the flight and arrival at the airport, she did most of her sightseeing as she and her sister, Marilyn, were driven by a number of famous places, from Shea Stadium to Trump Tower, to their hotel.
Keenan didn’t really have time to unpack before being called by the studio. Sleeping with the sounds of New York City buzzing until the early morning was difficult.
“The traffic is going all the time,” Keenan said. “The rush traffic slowed down a bit between three and 3:30 in the morning.”
Keenan was in the game and taping by about noon on March 21.
Regis, she said, is fairly short.
“He’s full of energy just like on TV,” Keenan said. “He’s pretty cool. He was trying to keep everything upbeat. He does generally root for, (and) he does try to get a little zinger in.”
On and off camera, he asked her about the OSU-Notre Dame Fiesta Bowl, when OSU annihilated Notre Dame. Regis is “Mr. Notre Dame,” and she didn’t really know how to answer the question. She didn’t really want to put his team down.
“I don’t believe in kicking somebody when they’re down,” Keenan said. The on-camera bit was edited out.
“I tried not to be overly serious,” Keenan said. From the moment she first called the show and tried out, she never expected to be on the show at all.
She had tried to get on the show once before. The first step is calling the show and answering three questions. From their the contestant’s name is put in a drawing. That is as far as Keenan got the first time. She didn’t expect to be called.
Her second attempt was in February. Her name was drawn, and she was able to call the show on March 14 to answer five questions, which are just like the fastest-finger contest. That’s followed by another random drawing.
The show called her back, and Keenan was on her way.
“I was quite shocked,” she said. Her sister, Katie, “is the biggest Regis fan. She encouraged me to call in.”
In the hot seat, Keenan was thinking ahead and quiet, figuring the answers in her head rather than talking them out.
“The first (questions) seemed kind of easy,” Keenan said. The first tricky question was at $32,000 when she was asked who served as vice president and then president without being elected. She had to get the sequence of the early 1970s into order in her mind before she could answer Gerald Ford. The next question was about the spider.
The way a person looks at the prize money changes when they’re a contestant, Keenan said. That’s real money at that point, and it gets harder to risk it.
“I really didn’t go there expecting anything,” Keenan said. “I walked away with more than I came with. I would’ve been happy with $1,000…. I got in there. I actually got to a high level. I’m really not disappointed. I’m proud of myself. Not a lot of people get on there, regionally speaking. Considering all the distractions, it’s really amazing.”