Being sick sucks. We have all had those days when we wake up feeling like someone hit us with a tractor trailer in the middle of the night, when all we want to do is pull the covers up to your chin all day with a bowl of soup, a bottle of ginger ale and the remote to the TV.
That really is the ultimate remedy for a 24-hour bug, especially when I was a kid. Skipping Taking a sick day from school to rest on the couch and take in daytime television was the best. You had the weekday morning cartoons, syndicated talk shows, your mom’s “stories” and, best of all, game shows. I’m a child of the 1980s, so when I was home from school, I was entertained by the likes of “Press Your Luck,” “Concentration,” “Win, Lose or Draw” and the granddaddy of them all, “The Price is Right.”
I would watch these shows and fantasize about how my job as an adult would be game show contestant, and I would spend my “workday” going show-to-show, playing Plinko and screaming “No Whammies,” cleaning up in cash and prizes to pay my bills.
Most of these game shows were ones I watched on my own but there were two that I usually had several other family members watching with me. The first was Nickelodeon’s “Double Dare.” Me and my siblings would watch that show religiously, pretending host Marc Summers was asking us the trivia questions and boasting how if we were on the show we would be able to breeze through the “Double Dare” obstacle course.
The other game show we watched required a lot less Physical Challenges and was more beloved by the entire family, and still is. That is “Family Feud.” As a family we have seen many hosts come and go — Louie Anderson, Richard Karn, John O’Hurley and currently Steve Harvey.
I know that Richard Dawson started off as the host of “Family Feud” but the first host I remember was Ray Combs. Combs, along with Marc Summers and “Press Your Luck” host Peter Tomarken, are the people I most associate with my childhood that I know very little about outside of game shows.
Sidenote: I just Googled them and found out two of the three met tragic deaths: Combs died by suicide in 1996 and Tomarken was killed in a plane crash in 2006. Marc Summers is battling cancer but is alive and doing well.
“Family Feud” has even made its way into our family’s holiday traditions. Whenever we are all able to get together for the holidays, we play our own home version of “Family Feud.” With my younger brother as host, we divide into two teams and play for family bragging rights.
This love of the game recently led my older brother to submit an application to the show for us to appear. We were not only surprised when he revealed this during a family Facetime chat but also said they responded back and that each of us would be getting an e-mail setting up an interview with one of the show’s producers.
While I had envisioned myself on many game shows in the past, this was the first time that I was meeting with a show producer to discuss this as an actuality.
They had us all gather on a Zoom call, which led me to think how did these interviews happen before Zoom and Facetime were a thing, because not only was this an interview but a mock game that we played with the producer.
She went down the line, as if she was Steve Harvey and we were in front of a live studio audience, first asking my brother — the team captain — to introduce the family, then down the line we were asked to tell a little something about ourselves and then answer a question. Along with playing the game, we were encouraged to cheer our teammates on by clapping and shouting “good answer!”
This made for an interesting environment for Watermark’s Orlando-based staff as I had to do this interview from my desk at work. I was a weird mix of subdued and enthused as a contestant, which was hopefully balanced out by my siblings’ much more excited and boisterous demeanors.
For anyone who is curious, the question we were asked: Name something a pirate takes off before he gets into bed. Top seven answers were on the board —eye patch, hat, hook, wooden leg, parrot, boot and sword. We did not get them all, so hopefully that doesn’t weigh against us.
It is now in the hands of the “Family Feud” gods but even if we don’t get that call to be on the show I can now say that I have taken that leap to try and appear in the game show world. I’ll keep you all posted if I get to play the Feud.
