Montpelier employee competes on Jeopardy

What is…assistant curator at Montpelier fulfills a lifelong dream on national television?
While he can't reveal the outcome of the game, Grant Quertermous will readily make known that his recent appearance on the nationally televised know-it-all game show Jeopardy was the experience of a lifetime.
The 29-year-old Kentucky native who now lives in Charlottesville and works at James Madison's Montpelier, has been answering questions-or phrasing answers in the form of a question-since he was a kid. Back then, Quertermous said he spent his afterschool hours, on an almost-daily basis, watching contestants hazard a guess at the Daily Double and risk it all in a round of Double Jeopardy.
By the time he was in the fifth grade, Quertermous was competitive on his school's quiz team, cleaning up the competition all the way through his middle and high school years in fast-paced Q and A, battle of the brains matches.
So when Quertermous learned Jeopardy producers were holding auditions nearby in April of last year, he leapt at the chance to stand on stage, buzzer in-hand, armed with all manner of trivia, random bits of knowledge and little-known facts, and poised to answer whatever host Alex Trebek asked (or question what Trebek answered, as it were).
Quertermous handily made it through one, and then the next round of Jeopardy auditions--and that's no small feat in a university town like Charlottesville, where experts, geniuses and Mensa members are a dime a dozen. After acing those initial short-answer test-type auditions, Quertermous learned he was one of 30 in the final pool of contestants. Then, as he understood, month after long month could pass while he waited to hear if he would be chosen to compete in the real thing.
In September, he got the answer he'd been waiting for when a Jeopardy producer called and announced Quertermous had been selected as a contestant on the show.
Quertermous said hearing that news was somewhat surreal. First, there was the phone call announcing he would soon realize one of his lifelong ambitions. "Then, basically I was told I needed to be out in Los Angeles for the taping," he remembered, still buzzing with the excitement.
From that point, Quertermous said he did what he could to bone up on his cultural literacy, his knowledge of the humanities, quadratic equations, nuclear fission, Abyssinian poetry, potent potables-and anything else that he might face out in that L.A. studio when he made his appearance.
Cramming and studying in advance of his shot at a Jeopardy title, Quertermous said, was done facing Trebek's on-screen image.
"I watched a lot of [the show] on TV," he explained. "The only way you can study is to watch it."
Quertermous tuned in during the time before the taping, he said, and out in California, he and his fellow contestants warmed up with a few practice sessions.
Ahead of the Nov. 27 air date, Quertermous can't divulge the details of the show, he said. But there's no question that he's happy to have had a shot at being the next Jeopardy champ.
"The whole thing is something I'm never going to forget," he said.