I was certain I knew the correct answer, and the number sequence on the tiny digital screen in front of me told me that I had keyed it in correctly. The only question was which of us had done it the fastest. Of the nine names on the video monitor above us, six of them had turned green. But only one of those green names was blinking: mine. The show’s host, Regis Philbin, reinforced this by announcing my name as the winner. It was only much later did I see that, with a time of 5.08 seconds, I had beaten the next closest person by only twelve one-hundredths of a second. This had been the second “fastest-finger” question of our taping. I had screwed up the first one, when there had been ten of us contestants, putting European cities in a specified geographic order, which, because of the way my brain works, I had to put in a particular country, then put those countries in order, and then hit my four buttons. Because I rushed it, I had keyed in the order before my brain had finished processing. The result had been an incorrect answer and the shame of not even seeing my name light up in green.
But now, not only was my name in green, it was blinking. I pumped my fist at the victory, but it took me a full second to realize that the excited contestant jumping up and moving from the fastest finger stations to the Hot Seat was supposed to be me. We’d gone over it in rehearsals earlier that afternoon, where we were supposed to go if we won a fastest finger round. I was to walk over to a spot next to Regis, shake his hand, and follow his lead, which meant either walking straight to the Hot Seat or standing there while the show cut to a commercial break. I finally got up after what seemed like an embarrassingly long time but was probably only a second or two. At this point in the show, Regis stayed put as I shook his hand, turning to me to ask how I was feeling. “Nervous,” I think I replied. Regis reassured me, telling me that I would do fine. The studio audience was applauding; the lights were flashing; and a camera on a boom arm was shooting across the studio overhead.
Everything seemed to stop at once, and staff members converged around Regis and me. They herded us over to the Hot Seat area in the middle of the set. I took my place in the Hot Seat. Someone came and put a fresh glass of water on the little table next to me as someone else put additional makeup on my face. Another makeup artist was working on Regis who already had what appeared to be several coats of the stuff on his face. One of the main producers, the one who had conducted our contestant rehearsal on the set earlier in the day, brought the card with my information to Regis and pointed at something on it. I knew, of course, what she was pointing at, which made me more nervous than I otherwise would have been.
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire had premiered on ABC television in August 1999, just as my wife and I were bringing our newborn son home from the hospital. I didn’t watch that first episode, but I started watching very early in the show’s run. Being a lover of trivia and someone who was good at remembering useless facts, I immediately wanted to be a contestant. At the end of most episodes, Regis would give out a telephone to call if someone wanted to be a contestant. That number dialed into an automated phone game that was much like the Fastest Finger rounds on the show. Once a tape date had been chosen at the start of the call, up to three questions would be asked, and callers would have to use their phone keypad to input the correct order of whatever four items had been given. Only ten seconds were allowed per question, and if a person answered incorrectly or failed to answer within the ten second limit, the call was over. Because each caller had to input his or her birthday and the last four digits of their Social Security number at the beginning of each call, a person could only call once per day. If a caller got all three questions correct, that person would be put into a random drawing for the next day. If chosen, the potential contestant would get a call the following day to confirm their information and would be given a phone number, a Personal Identification Number, and a time to call to play a five-question playoff round. The ten contestants for the chosen tape date would be pulled from the top qualifiers from that five-question playoff.
I called and played the game every day the phone lines were open, which worked out to about ten days out of each month, for a year and a half. I got all three questions correct about sixty times. Of those sixty times, I got called back twice. My first playoff round, sometime in the year 2000, went poorly. I never heard anything from it. My second callback gave me a date of February 27, 2001, for the playoff round. I stayed home from work that day since I could barely talk because of a sore throat and called in at the appointed time. I wrote my options on a notepad, keyed in my answers, and wrote what my answers had been. Once the five questions were finished, I hung up and checked my answers online. I’d gotten all five of them correct. I was both excited and nervous, and I began pacing my apartment.
About an hour and a half after my playoff phone game, I got a call from a young lady identifying herself as Taryn Brill, an associate producer for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. I restrained myself from jumping up and down as I spoke with her. She verified my information, confirmed the tape date I had selected as March 7, 2001, and asked which airport was closest to me. She confirmed that my wife and I would be booked on a flight to New York for March 6 and would be staying at the Empire Hotel in Manhattan for at least two nights, all paid for by the production company.
The following week was a blur as we prepared ourselves for the trip. I picked up a World Almanac and started reading it like it was a novel, hoping anything I read might stick and help me answer whatever came up. During that week, Taryn Brill called me back to conduct a thorough contestant interview. The results of this interview would be compiled onto a card that would be given to Regis if I made the Hot Seat so that he could choose what to talk about on air. During this interview, I mentioned that one of my part time jobs was as a model for college art classes.
“How did you get into that?” Taryn asked.
I answered something like, “I was a freshman in college living in the dorm, and at lunch one day one of the girls across from me said that she drew naked people in her art class. I said I’d like to do that, and because I had been interested in her, I figured that I had better follow through on it.”
“Wait,” she said, “you model nude?”
I confessed that I did. She told me that this was the first time she had been shocked in one of these contestant interviews.
“Are you sure you want that going on your card? Because I can guarantee you Regis will talk about it if it’s there.”
I thought about it for a moment and decided that art modeling was important to me. I had done it since 1984, over sixteen years at that point, and that it was just a part of my life. So, I told her yes, put it on the card, thinking then that the chances of my making the Hot Seat were only about 25 percent or so.
Of course, I made that Hot Seat, and now Regis was about to talk about my nude modeling job in front of everyone I had ever known. I had kept it pretty much a secret outside of the art world. I had a regular 8 to 5 job in an office with dozens of colleagues, and a host of family and friends who knew nothing about my side hustle.
The crew members all stepped off the set, the audience applause started up, and the cameras started rolling. Regis introduced my wife and me to the audience as the applause died down and then went right into it.
“Now Dan, you’re a computer guy.”
“Yeah,” I said, cringing inside.
“But you also have a part-time job.”
Damn it, I thought, he was going to make me say it. Why couldn’t he have just stated himself from the card.
“Yeah, I do,” I admitted. “Three or four times a month I, uh, model for college art classes.”
“Do you model nude?” No hesitation from Regis.
I nodded. “Usually.”
“You know, I did the same thing.”
“Oh, you did?” I said immediately, surprising myself.
“No, I’m kidding.”
After a pause to allow the audience to laugh, Regis said, “No kidding, you stand there nude.”
“Stand, sit, whatever.”
I nodded, and Regis nodded with me.
“So, you’re not a shy guy,” he said.
I felt like I was and had always been, but all I said was, “I used to be.”
“Not anymore,” he said.
I repeated the phrase “not anymore,” feeling awkward and thinking that I needed to say something else. My throat still felt rough from the previous week, so I said, “I still have a sore throat from the last class I did,” even though modeling had nothing whatsoever to do with said soreness.
“Yeah, it’s chilly in there, I bet,” Regis said.
The studio audience laughed again, and Regis looked past me to my wife. He usually talks to whomever is in the “relationship seat” with every contestant, so I expected this.
“Jennifer, do you mind?”
My wife, who in the video looked like a deer in headlights, said, “No, I love it. I think it’s great.”
There was a bunch of nervous laughter in the studio as Regis said, “What do we have here folks?” He seemed to catch himself, looked up at me, and said, “Someone’s got to do it, right Dan?”
Trying to add a bit of levity to a job that I take seriously even if most people don’t, I said, “Yeah, they need to learn to draw anatomy. And after a while, it just become another job.”
“Well, thank God you’re the man for the job.”
Thankfully, that was the end of the discussion about my modeling job, at least for the moment, as we went into game play. After I correctly answered the $16,000 question, we broke for a commercial. After the commercial break, Regis went back to my nude modeling job which was slightly irritating as that next question, the $32,000 one, was a safe level and a very important part of the game. He started off by saying that he didn’t want to dwell on it and then did dwell on it by asking me if I’d had to audition for the job.
I told him no, that the artists prefer to work from a wide range of body types. This led to a discussion about my first time modeling, which I told him (and the audience) about without the awkwardness of that first conversation. Once we got back to the game questions, the discussion about my nude modeling job was finally over.
I wound up missing my $250,000 question, meaning that I took home $32,000 dollars, the last safe level question I had answered. I had played aggressively, wanting to win that top prize. When the show aired on March 11, it was the fifth most watched hour of television for the entire week, with an estimated viewership of fifty million. The reception I got from family and friends regarding my modeling job was mostly positive with only one rude question (which came from one of the higher corporate officers at work).
Talking about my modeling job in such a public way was very freeing in a multitude of ways. I felt like I had nothing to hide from anyone anymore. Modeling, for me, became more of a job than something like a secret hobby or pastime, and treating it like a job made me an even better model. And being so public about art modeling made me approachable by anyone who might be curious about such an unusual profession.
See a clip from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire described here, featuring Dan:
Visit Dan's professional writing website: https://dhjonathan.com/page/2/?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAaaUOZrBiCVxukwuJ1xcRVH8S5zp02yrfMaOzFqz9-17V-v6FUb0E729hNk_aem_Jxig6ojHwqkoCzK9pY2B6A
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