Tuesday, May 10
May 10, 2011Thursday, May 12
May 12, 2011
Nicholls State senior nursing student Abbie Lapeyrouse said she looks forward to 6:30 p.m. each day so she can watch Wheel of Fortune.
“Wheel of Fortune is a show that my family has watched for as long as I can remember,” she said. “We’ve always watched that together.”
When that time comes around today, the person the Houma native sees on the TV will look awfully familiar.
That’s because the Nicholls student competed on the world famous TV game show during its recent stroll through New Orleans for its College Week.
Lapeyrouse said the experience she had on the show would last a lifetime.
“This was always like a dream of mine,” Lapeyrouse said. “This is something that I could never forget.”
The way Lapeyrouse signed up to participate on the show was through online qualifying. Lapeyrouse’s mother is a long-time fan of the show and also a member of the Wheel Watcher’s Club, an online fan club offered by the show, which gives email updates and incentives to fans.
“She got an email about College Week coming to town and she knew that they were coming to New Orleans,” Lapeyrouse recalled. “So she sent my name and my email in.”
Signing up for the show is one thing, but being chosen to be featured on a live taping is another.
Lapeyrouse knows that, first-hand, as no more than “a few weeks” prior to registering for College Week, she had attempted to try out for the show when the Wheel Mobile came to town.
“My mom was called on stage after the tryout, but I was not,” Lapeyrouse said. “So I was kind of bummed.”
The second time was the charm, as Lapeyrouse tried out for College Week and was chosen to take part in a live taping.
As a fan of the show, Lapeyrouse obviously knew most of the rules about how to play the game
But when the cameras are rolling and the show goes live, she soon realized that playing armchair puzzle solver on the couch at home and being in the heat of the moment were two completely different animals.
“You have no idea how nervous I was,” Lapeyrouse said with a laugh. “Sure, being on the show is very awesome and fun. But you don’t meet Pat Sajak until right when the cameras roll. When he comes on the screen and says, ‘Here’s such and such from wherever in the USA,’ that’s when you first meet him. So, I was definitely very star-struck. I felt literally every emotion when I saw him and heard him say my name. I was nervous, I was anxious. I was happy. I was scared. It’s really hard to explain exactly how I was feeling. Honestly, it was really kind of freaking me out.”
The way Lapeyrouse said she settled into a groove was through doing what she does best, playing the game she loves. She said she “played the game very well.”
Finding a groove is probably a must. Lapeyrouse said it takes just 20 minutes to tape one episode and there are only short breaks in between puzzles.
Those breaks were one of the contestant’s favorite things about the experience, for reasons different than one might expect.
“They stop after each puzzle and the makeup artists will come and touch up your makeup,” Lapeyrouse said. “And that was probably one of the coolest things about this for me is that you have these professional makeup artists doing your makeup and they also give you some water because most people, I guess were as nervous as me. I had cotton mouth like you wouldn’t believe.”
Per the show’s rules, she couldn’t confirm how much money she won, but she was able to say that she got to solve a puzzle.
She also added that one of the biggest challenges she faced was the ever-famous wheel, which she said dealt her with some bad luck throughout the taping.
Just giving it a turn at all was hard enough, according to Lapeyrouse.
“The wheel wasn’t really my friend,” she said. “It stresses me out how heavy it was. When I’m telling you, this wheel was the heaviest thing, I tell a joke, I say, ‘You know when you watch people and they spin the wheel and you hear the click noise like click, click, click, click, click, click? For me, it’s just click, click, click.’ That’s how heavy it was. I don’t even know if I could spin it around one time. It was ridiculously heavy.”
Aside from playing the game and being featured on TV, Lapeyrouse said that she had plenty of support in the crowd from family and also classmates in the audience, as the show partners with each participating university to give free tickets to the schools of the participants to create a lively environment.
Lapeyrouse said she also gave an allotment of tickets she received to some of her fellow nursing student classmates.
“When I got up there and they said, ‘This is Abbey from Houma,’ there were so many people yelling for me,” she said. “I was like ‘Wow!’ I didn’t even think that many people knew what Nicholls was. But I got a good applause, so that was nice.”
So with this experience complete, Lapeyrouse is back to her day-to-day life, which will culminate in a December 2011 graduation.
For now, she invited everyone to join her by their TV sets tonight to root on the local girl in the beloved famous game.
“Everyone should watch the show and see how I did,” she said. “I definitely had the time of my life.”
Nicholls State senior Abbie Lapeyrouse claps in excitement as she looked at the board during a Wheel of Fortune College Week taping. Lapeyrouse was a contestant on the show, which will air tonight at 6:30 p.m. COURTESY PHOTO
