Annadale woman vies for 'Millionaire' title
24-year-old will be going for big
bucks as a contestant on ABC's TV game show
Staten Island Advance - Wednesday, March 1,
2006
Lisa Juarez is on game shows all the time - in her
living room. The 24-year-old from Annadale has regular game nights
in which she and family and friends challenge each other on trivia
and vie for bragging rights.
But she's on a much bigger stage tomorrow, when she
sits with Meredith Vieira on ABC's "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?"
and goes for the big bucks.
"It was just like an out-of-body experience," Miss
Juarez said yesterday. "Once you sit in that seat, it's like you're
in another world."
It was a bit of a fluke, how Miss Juarez got on the
show: She accompanied her future sister-in-law to ABC studios,
strictly for support, as the woman took the preliminary test. The
show's staff asked Miss Juarez, too, to test, and she figured, why
not?
"I ended up passing the test and she didn't, and
they called me two days later to ask me to be on the show," she
said.
She taped in November, which means she has had to
keep mum for three months on everything - how hard the contest was,
what topics (if any) tripped her up, which lifelines she used,
whether she did better than she expected and, of course, how much
money she won.
"I almost didn't tell anybody I was going to tape,"
she said. "It was harder in the first couple of weeks after I taped,
because then everybody was interested. Now it's starting up again."
She could only say that one of her lifelines, the
call-a-friend, may feature her 14-year-old brother, Andrew, whom she
kept on hold in case she needed help in her worst subject, politics.
"He knows everything there is to know about
presidential history," she said.
And she just might know everything else. Miss Juarez
has changed majors at Hunter College three times, which is why she
hasn't yet graduated. She began as a business major then switched to
English literature, and now is now a writing major.
She's also a bartender in Manhattan, is taking
classes at the College of Staten Island and will be back in school
come fall, to take a master's degree in occupational therapy.
"I've been in school forever," she said. "That can
help in knowing a lot about things."
By Melissa Anelli
Reprinted here with permission
from the
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