The Contestant Who Outsmarted The Price is Right |
Terry Kniess has prepared. Over the back of the living-room couch, he's draped the yellow T-shirts he and his wife, Linda, wore that fateful morning on The Price Is Right. Hers has a photograph of their beloved departed Maltese on the front: "This is my Krystal and she was spayed," it reads. "Is your pet spayed or neutered?" Host Drew Carey's signature is on the back. Terry's shirt is simpler, and it's unsigned: "Las Vegas loves The Price Is Right." On the coffee table, he's laid out the iconic name tags he and Linda were given, as well as their green seat assignments for the first of two tapings on September 22, 2008, in the Bob Barker Studio at CBS's Television City: 004 and 005—right down in front, immediately to the left of the four podiums on Contestant's Row. He has the giant white cue card that a stagehand held up—TERRY KNIESS—because most contestants can't hear announcer Rich Fields telling them to come on down above the sound of the crowd. (Terry couldn't.) He also has the operating instructions for the Big Green Egg, "The World's Best Smoker and Grill," which Terry won with a perfect bid of $1,175 from Contestant's Row. It's by the pool out back, and Terry agrees that it's awesome. He has Linda's passport out, just in case, and their marriage certificate, dated April 7, 1972. "I know I would ask to see it," he says. He turns over the back of the giant white cue card to show the meticulous notes he jotted down after the show, including his final take—actual retail price, $56,437.41—after he won both Showcases, the game's ultimate prize, with yet another perfect bid, the first in the show's thirty-eight-year-long daytime history: $23,743. And then, last, he lifts up a copy of a supermarket tabloid with the headline DREW CAUGHT UP IN PRICE IS RIGHT RIGGING SCANDAL and with a story about Terry on page 9, his name misspelled ("Terry Neese") but the numbers exactly right. "If there's one thing I've learned through all this," Terry says, "it's that there's such a thing as being too perfect." |
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Taylor Kitsch is Wild and Free |
Taylor Kitsch has been following a white wolf for five miles through the Montana wilderness, not far from his home in Bozeman. Up the hills, around to the drainage they go. He knows she's nearby, but not this close—just off the other side of the tree he's crouching next to. She is right there, all 150-some-pounds of her. Three weeks later and a thousand miles away, Kitsch is showing me the video of their second run in. "Man, we can talk this shit all day," he says. The problem is—as I watch her hind legs scatter out of frame, quizzing him about the size of a wolf's home and how they hunt—Kitsch is not talking about himself, which is why I'm here. Unless he is talking about himself. |
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The World Needs Uncles, Too |
I'm never having children. It's a decision I made at a very young age and have never wavered from. There are a number of things I can point to in my childhood that led me to this decision. The town I lived in when I was young had the highest teenage pregnancy rate per capita in the entire state, which means I grew up doing my damndest to avoid procreating. My own parents were married when they had me, just to different people, meaning that my mere existence definitely complicated things for both of them. The list goes on. The end result is that I'm not having kids, no matter how many people tell me—as they did when I was a teenager, in my early twenties, late twenties, thirties, and still now, as I approach 40—"Oh, you just wait. You'll be a father soon." Simply stated, for a plethora of reasons, from emotional to financial, raising another human being full-time is not for me. Yet during the pandemic, I felt a new responsibility to show up as support to family members and friends with children. |
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James Caan: What I've Learned |
I'll bump into a guy in a bar, and he'll say, "I'm sorry, Sonny!" It's surreal. Nobody should give a shit about an actor's opinion on politics. One night I went over to get some dope from some Hollywood tough guy. After I left, my son Scott, who was only fifteen, went over with a baseball bat to kill him. I was laughing out of one eye and crying out of the other. I thought, Who am I kidding? There's a big difference between wanting to work and having to work. And I had to learn that the hard way. Now money is very important to me, because I ain't got it. |
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My Cold War Youth Suddenly Feels Like the Present |
The nuns lied. In October 1962, those of us in the third grade at St. Peter's School in Worcester, Massachusetts, noticed that we were being herded into the basement of the old school building every day. The basement was concrete, and it smelled of age and wet linoleum. It was also chilly, and yet with all of us milling around, the walls started to sweat anyway. It was a cold October that year. Along about the fourth or fifth day of this, somebody asked the nuns what was going on. Not that we minded the break in the school day, but there seemed to be a weird kind of urgency in the way the sisters hustled us between the new school building and the old. Eventually, we all came to the opinion that it had something to do with the ominous events we heard about with half an ear at home as our parents watched the evening news. But the nuns lied to us. They told us these were only fire drills. |
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Anson Mount Sets a High Bar |
As male starship captains go, Captain Pike has the best hair in the history of Star Trek. This isn't remotely up for debate. Although Chris Pine's Captain Kirk was once christened "James Tiberius Perfect Hair" in 2013, those days are long over. Anson Mount's Captain Christopher Pike (the captain who preceded Kirk in Trek's sprawling chronology) has the best dude hair in the entire Final Frontier. If you were to check the hashtag for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, various memes might lead you to believe that the main character of the latest and boldest Trek is, in fact, Mount's coiffure. But Mount is not really interested in the way he looks, telling Esquire, "I'm the kind of guy who hates shopping. I hate grooming myself." And then, Mount immediately gives all the credit to someone else: "That's all our resident hair guru, Daniel Losco. His work seems to have been noticed." |
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