When Katie Vercilli of Kapaa stepped onto “The Price is Right” set this past August, she had everything she needed, except for her glasses. That, though, was part of her strategy. Her enthusiasm and home-made “Kauai Loves The Price is
When Katie Vercilli of Kapaa stepped onto “The Price is Right” set this past August, she had everything she needed, except for her glasses. That, though, was part of her strategy.
Her enthusiasm and home-made “Kauai Loves The Price is Right” T-shirt caught the producer’s attention and her experience watching the show landed her on stage, but we have to wait until the show airs today to see what happened next.
“The gal from ‘The Price is Right’ said I can’t say whether I won or what I won,” Vercilli said. “I can’t say what I bid on or anything.”
It was show of a different kind that drew Vercilli to the West Coast — her favorite band was playing in the City of Angels and she wasn’t about to miss it.
“I absolutely love Mumford and Sons and I’ve always promised myself that I’d go see them if they ever came anywhere close to Hawaii,” Vercilli said. “I found out they were going to LA and I couldn’t miss it.”
She grabbed a pair of tickets and met a friend from Colorado for the show, scheduling a few extra days in the city after the concert. In order to fill time, Vercilli said she thought about getting tickets for Jimmy Kimmel, but she got more excited about a chance to be on “The Price is Right.”
“You can go to their website and get tickets for their tapings and if they have them available, they’ll let you know, but if not there’s standby tickets and that’s what I did,” Vercilli said.
Though they weren’t guaranteed to get in, Vercilli and her friend Bridget showed up early that morning and waited a few hours in line before they were finally ushered into the building. After that, it was a few more hours of winding lines and little rooms where potential audience members and contestants filled out media release paperwork.
“The whole time you’re in there, people are walking around and you don’t know how they’re sizing you up,” Vercilli said.
As they moved through the line, the pair came upon a big fake wheel, like the one that is used in the show. Everyone in line was taking their turn with photographers and videographers, auditioning their excited responses to a faux announcement that they’d just won a car.
“It was definitely an audition kind of thing and some of them were having no reactions and that’s not going to get you on the show,” Vercilli said. “My friend and I got up there and we fully committed with our scream.”
After chatting up the producer, who was going down the line talking with everyone, Vercilli felt confident that she’d made a great impression.
“I told him that everyone in Kauai loves ‘The Price is Right’ and he started asking questions,” Vercilli said. “I was like, ‘Aha! I hooked him.’”
The friends were seated in the far back of the studio, however, and the pair had a hard time seeing what was happening on stage.
Four or five people made it onto the stage before the crew called a name and no one responded.
“They had the name of the person that’s supposed to go to Contestant Row on a card and I was like, ‘Bridget, whose name is on that card?’” Vercilli said. “Bridget strained around to look and she was like, ‘It’s your name!’”
Vercilli jumped up to weave her way through the packed auditorium, but she only made it a few feet down the row before her leg got caught in the shoulder straps of an audience member’s purse.
“So I was stuck, and I couldn’t move and I was worried they were going to call someone else’s name,” Vercilli said. “I didn’t want to blow my moment and somehow I got my foot out of that lady’s purse and made it down there.”
Once on Contestant Row, Vercilli began to question her earlier decision to ditch her glasses.
“I had never seen anyone called up who had glasses on, it’s very rare, and I don’t know if if it’s because of glare, but I didn’t want to X myself out,” Vercilli said. “I ended up not wearing them — I only need them for distance and how necessary are they?”
The glasses probably would have been helpful in reading the giant game board displayed on a screen some distance away.
“I really couldn’t see what it said and I thought, ‘This might have been a bad choice,’” Vercilli said.
Once she started bidding, Vercilli started using other strategies, like listening to the audience weigh in on what she should bid on. She also had her husband Jason’s voice in her head, who loves “The Price is Right,” but who stayed home from this particular vacation because he isn’t as interested in Mumford and Sons.
“He hates it when the next person bids one dollar over you because you have no chance after that,” Vercilli said. “He’d never forgive me if I bid a dollar over somebody, so I knew I’d never do that.”
Trusting the audience, however, wasn’t as cut and dried, and Vercilli said bidding was “a real turmoil.”
“In my gut I wanted to go one way and the audience was totally saying the other way, so I went with the audience,” Vercilli said. “And now, I can’t tell you anymore.”
Vercilli’s episode of “The Price is Right” will air today at 10 a.m. HST.
