Adam Remsen started going to trivia night, hosted at the Midtown watering hole Kudzu’s by charming Irish redhead Jo Delahunty Chetter, around 1999. When Kudzu’s went under, his team Plane Hamburger moved to the P&H Cafe. In 2003, the Jeopardy! Brain Bus rolled through town. He and his teammate, former Flyer writer Chris Herrington, decided to audition to be contestants on the show. A few months later, Remsen got the call. But, as luck would have it, he had work commitments which prevented him from going. Still, he didn’t give up. “I tried out every chance I could. I went and did in-person auditions in quite a few cities. I know I went to Atlanta twice, Charlotte, Lexington, Nashville. I did the in-person auditions at least five times before they switched over to everything being online.”
These days, Remsen is an attorney by day. By night, he is the co-founder of Quark Theatre, an independent theater company mounting the first show in its new home at Theaterworks this August. Meanwhile, after auditioning relentlessly for 20 years, Remsen finally got the call again last March. “I had about three weeks to get ready for taping,” he says.
As luck would have it, the very week he was invited to Culver City, California, Remsen was scheduled for jury duty. But he wasn’t letting another chance at Jeopardy! glory pass him by. “So I called the jury coordinator, and I was like, ‘Hey, I was supposed to be at jury duty in April, but I got invited to be a contestant on Jeopardy!’ And she was like, ‘What? Don’t worry about it! Go do Jeopardy! It’s fine!’” says Remsen. (His jury duty was rescheduled for later this year.)
For a Jeopardy! superfan like Remsen, who has not missed an episode of the show in 15 years, seeing the shiny, blue Alex Trebek Stage for the first time is “very much an ‘ooh!’ moment.
“I went there, having no idea what to expect. You go in the green room, and there’s 13 of you — there’s two people for each episode, so that’s 10. There are two alternates, usually people who live in L.A. And then there’s the returning champ.”
The contestants bond as they wait for their turns behind the podium. “Bob Harris said this in his book, Prisoner of Trebekistan, which I think is the second best book about Jeopardy! It sounded like a platitude when I read it, but he said ‘Really the best part of it is the people you meet.’ And I was like, okay, whatever, Bob. But really, it’s true!”
Friendship is grand, but you can’t beat winning, and that’s what Remsen has been doing on Jeopardy! Since his first episode on June 12th, he has won more than $130,000. He’s naturally tight-lipped about how long his run will go on, but on the afternoon of his seventh win, he joined the regulars at RP Tracks who gather for Jeopardy! every weekday at 3:30 p.m. Retired teacher Fran Murrah, who has been a fan of the show for decades, says Remsen’s performance against his competitors has been “Excellent. Dominant, even. Brilliant! Getting to see a hometowner on the show is just a thrilling thing.”
