My Story Part 187: Diana’s Excellent Adventure, Amy Schneider

Yesterday I went to a place that I never have been before, a Catholic University. But it was for a good reason… to hear a talk by Amy Schneider of Jeopardy fame.

It was an hour drive down to Fairfield and then about a half hour to find a parking space. I ended up playing vulture. Sitting be the entrance waiting for a student to walk in to the parking lot and following them to their car, there was a couple of false starts with the student just cutting across the parking but finally I found a space.

Then to go in to meet my patron to get my comp ticket and he is nowhere in sight. Of course I have only seen him on Zoom so I don’t really know what he looks like, just from the neck up.

After texting and calling him I decided to check out the box office… nope no reserved tickets from him. I dropped my ace card, well is there any reserved for the head of security? I stood there looking a little dejected and one of the students said just print out a ticket for her… Bingo!

As many of you know I am on the governor’s advisory council and at our last meeting on Zoom he sent a chat post to me that Amy Schneider is speaking at Scared Heart University would I like to go to see her?

YES!

So he arranged to get me a comp ticket and that was the beginning of the adventure.

First thing move the Zoom meeting that we move twice before… Please, please lets reschedule the meeting, please.

Then the next barrier was the class that I was scheduled to do at 5:30 that evening, changed to 6:30.

So the doors open for the auditorium and I got a seat back a few rows on the end of the row.

Finally the talk started and she gave a short history of her life… similar to my own story.

She also was diagnosed later in life with a learning disorder, same here.

She just squeaked by in college, ditto.

In Fairfield, Amy Schneider says road to ‘Jeopardy!’ fame began with a question
CT Post
By Ethan Fry
March 23, 2022


“Jeopardy!” champion Amy Schneider told an audience of college students Wednesday that if they’re having trouble with classes and grades, she can definitely relate.

“I barely graduated,” Schneider, who has the second longest winning streak on the iconic trivia show, told about 200 people inside Sacred Heart University’s Edgerton Center for the Performing Arts. “I just made it over the finish line, and it wasn’t always clear that I would.”

The most successful woman ever to compete on the show — she has won nearly $1.4 million so far — Schneider is also the first transgender contestant to qualify for its Tournament of Champions, set to air in November.

During a Q&A with Sacred Heart’s Nick Frias, she said that recent laws targeting trans people could end up have fatal consequences, particularly those prohibiting medical care for trans youth.

[…]

At the same time, she said such laws show that “we’ve already won, really.”

“This is the backlash of a dying movement,” Schneider said. “Once people come to accept that trans people are just people, and that LGBTQ people are just people and aren’t hurting anyone, they don’t change their minds. It’s a one-way street.

[…]

Schneider told her college audience Wednesday that her experience at the University of Dayton, though a fine school for many, wasn’t so great for her. She said her experiences stemmed, at least in part, because she was still closeted and had undiagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

“For my brain, college was a bad fit,” she said. “But obviously, it didn’t stop me, as I just demonstrated rather dramatically on national television. I managed to get a fair amount of information after all.”

Ditto for me but Dyslexia.

So after her talk my sponsor found me (I’m not to hard to find there was only one other 6 foot trans woman in the auditorium and she was on the stage.) and he had arranged for us to get backstage and have our photos taken with her (Photo to come once they get posted on the university’s website).

Then it was time to head north for the class that I am speaking at, no problem I have plenty of time, I can even grab a bite to eat.

After eating I headed out to UConn School of Medicine, no sweat I got 20 minutes to spare! As I go to get on the highway it is a parking lot! Whoa! But I know the back way there… well so did 20,000 other drivers and all the back roads were also parking lot.

I dash into the classroom just in time but out of breath.

So ended a very long day.

I will post the "official" phot taken by the school photographer when he posts them.