Video

When my parents came out to LA to visit me back in February, I got us all VIP tickets for the Price is Right through a friend who works for CBS. We were ineligible to win prizes but got to sit right behind the contestants and get a lot of TV face time. (I may have been the first studio audience member in the history of the show to wear a tie.) Being so close was almost as fun as being on the show. Since the contestants usually get their bids from the studio audience and I have a loud voice, we essentially played the game through them. What I learned: my mom and dad and I are good at guessing prices. Of the six contestants that made it up on stage, three used our bids, including one that was the actual retail price, netting Tracy Weaver of Nashville an extra five hundred dollars. (She did not share any of it with us.) It got to the point where we were picking contestants in advance to give our precious (and usually prescient) bid. My favorite was a guy named Wilbert, who had come with a group from the Solid Rock Baptist Church in Bakersfield. Unfortunately, Wilbert was not very smart when it came to pricing games and, even worse, he was getting his bids from his fellow church members, who weren't much better. After two failed attempts to give him my bid, I leaned forward during a commercial break and told him, "Listen, Wilbert, I'm not supposed to tell you this, but I work for CBS. I know all the prices so I can help the contestants with their bids; otherwise they would be all over the place. I want to help you get on stage but you've gotta listen to me." When it came time to bid on the next item, I told Wilbert to bid $500, but all the other contestants had bid so high that I tried to get him to bid $1 instead. He was already locked in on bidding $500, which he did, then turned around to check with me to make sure that was okay. Of course his was the winning bid. He even ended up getting to the Showcase Showdown, where he went with my bid of $14,000. Did he win? Watch the video to find out.