L-I-N-G-O

For a few weeks now I've been calling the Lingo contestant hotline obsessively, trying to get Shannon and myself on the show. This has been a goal of mine for about 2.8 years now, ever since my last stint living off my savings while lying on the beach and "writing" for a living. Things are quite different now in that I actually do make a bit of a living "writing" but I have no savings to live off. Yet if I were on Lingo, I'm sure I would amass a personal fortune just by spelling words out loud and picking balls from a clear plastic bowl.

The only problem is that being on Lingo is about as smart as me being on Dancing With The Tards or Love Connection, or any other show where I have to move my body to the music or act like I'm having a good time. Some of the things I'm really bad at doing are hip-hop dancing and hiding my true feelings, but my worst skill ever is spelling out loud.

I don't have any difficulty spelling in normal situations, it's just when I have to spell out loud to someone that things go awry. Instead of just telling a person the letters in a word, I have to write the word down and then read it off the page. I could be at a MENSA meeting, having made it all the way through the application and acceptance process by proving my bloated intelligence to everyone there, and someone could choke me with asking, "Hey Sarah, how do you spell believe???"

"Uh, just a sec...b-y-o-s-t-e-r? No wait, b-e-l-t-e-v-e-v-r?"

"No, that's not right. At all."

"Let me try again...b-e-o-v-a...Jesus, I know there's a U in there somewhere. Can I have a pen?"

"No, there isn't, and why are you even here?"

And thus is the reason I've spent two weeks trying to get on a game show where all you do is spell. Lingo is really just hangman bingo, a glorified version of Wheel Of Fortune but without the wheel or the fortune. You have a 5x5 grid and one letter to start with, and your goal is to spell the correct five-letter word starting with that letter. If you get it right, you get to pick some balls. Picking the right balls gives you Lingo, which means you get money. Basically, it's prom all over again.

Getting on the show requires you to call the contestant hotline over and over and over until someone answers. When someone does answer, she's incredibly, unnecessarily chipper and her name is ANGIE!!! And after you introduce yourself to her you realize she's actually a recorded voice and you've just been talking over her spiel about how to get on the show. So you call back, you listen to her explaining the contestant rules, and then you press 1 and wait as the Lingo theme song plays and they try and get someone on the phone to talk to you.

Then finally, you get ANGIE!!! on the phone, and you tell her you want to be a Lingo contestant! And she says,  "OK! Sarah! We're coming to our area in three weeks, so I'll put you on our list. How do you spell your name!!!"

And this is where I froze. I mean, I'm trying to get on a game show where the whole point is to spell out loud simple 5-letter words like "After" and "Before" and While". And yet, after and before and while I'm having this conversation with ANGIE!!! I cannot remember how to spell my own 5-letter name.

"My name?"
"Yes!! Spell it for me so I can get it right, please!"
"Ok. It's Sarah, so it's spelled like it sounds."
"Ok, so S-A-R??"
"Yep, that's it!"
"S-A-R...then what."
"S-A-R...H-A. It's Sarah."
"OK! See, I'm glad I asked, because it's spelled differently!"
"Uh, differently than what?"
"Than...how people usually spell it?"
"What? It's Sarah. S--A-R-H-A. That's not normal?"
"Sar-HA?"
"SAR-AH. AH. AH! SAR-AH."
"Ok, so...how do you spell that?"
SPELLED LIKE IT SOUNDS, ANGIE! Spelled like it sounds! S-A-R-H-A!!