More than a million people requested the chance to audition for Wheel of Fortune last year, close to 3,”200 auditioned, and fewer than 500 people were selected to appear on the show. Archana Pradhan Lackey of West Windsor was one of the lucky ones and the show will air on Thanksgiving, Thursday, November 22, at 7:30 p.m. on ABC.##M:[more]##
Pradhan Lackey began watching the Pat Sajak-Vanna White quiz show with her grandparents when she was 12 — “I have wanted to be on the show since I started watching it,” she says. Thanks to her daughter, Ashlyn, 11 1/2, a student at Grover Middle School, she acted on her dream. Ashlyn had heard about “Heroes Week,” honoring firefighters, police officers, and health professionals being taped in New York City, and she told her mother, a doctor, this would be the perfect opportunity.
Born in Mumbai, India, she came to the United States when she was 13 months old and was raised on Long Island, where her parents still live. She received her degree from Princeton and graduated from Duke Medical School. Pradhan Lackey has been at UMDNJ for six years where she splits her time between clinical medicine and serving as assistant dean at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.
She and her husband, Michael Lackey, were high school sweethearts. He graduated from Georgetown University with a bachelor’s degree and Columbia University Business School with a master’s degree. He is a vice president at New York Life in Manhattan. They moved to West Windsor six years ago. “We chose it for the school system and ethnic diversity,” she says. They also have an eight month-old daughter, Sonia.
The show was taped at Radio City Music Hall on Sunday, September 29. Being on the show was not anything like what she thought it would be. “I was very nervous, and the wheel was much heavier than I thought it would be,” she says. (Trivia alert: the wheel weighs 4,”000 pounds). “As the producer said it would be, it was the shortest 22 minutes of my life.”
Pradham says she was sequestered for a long time with the other contestants so they got to know each other. Although the staff gave them breakfast and lunch, most of them were too nervous to eat. When they brought the contestants out to the set they adjusted everyone’s heights so they appeared at same level before the camera.
They also had them practice spinning the wheel. “My hand was sore for a week afterward,” she says.
Although Pradham knows many of the tricks in solving Wheel of Fortune problems, she was not able to use most of them. At one point she knew the answer and she also knew that she could get more money if she spun, but she did not want to spin the heavy wheel. “When you’re up there even if you know all of the tricks, it’s hard to use them,” she says. “I bought vowels so I did not have to spin.”
Her advice to would-be contestants is surprising. Practicing the mental part by playing along at home is not her first suggestion. Rather she advises people to build their upper body strength so they can spin the wheel longer. “It is so easy at home but I was very nervous when I was up there,” she says. “Between that and the weight of the wheel, I could only move the wheel four or five wedges and that did not give me much time to look at the puzzle.” — Lynn Miller
