Qualifying for the May run of "Super Millionaire" started Monday evening. I was at my father's house in Tampa, but I still found a moment on both Monday and Tuesday to take the cordless phone to a quiet place and hear those magic words: "Hi. This is Regis."

No, seriously, the magic words were "I'm sorry. That answer is incorrect." But I was buoyed by the fact that both nights, I missed the fifth of five questions, better than I'd done on any of my eight attempts in February. The problem on Monday was that the question involved two books I had only a vague awareness of, and two books I had never even heard of. And the problem on Tuesday was that I only had a vague awareness of the movie "Jagged Edge," and its release date in particular. (I think I may have thought it was an Ashley Judd woman-in-trouble movie. But it's actually a Glenn Close woman-in-trouble movie.)

So it was back to L.A. on Wednesday, and there, in the bright sunlight of the 4:00 P.M. hour, I sat down in my favorite chair, with cordless phone, notebook, and pencil at the ready...

Long story short, I finally managed to qualify. I'm not going to post the questions, because everyone in America is now my personal competition in the battle to get one of 10 random phone calls, so the more I can do to help myself, the better. I'm already at a disadvantage because I wanted to select a tape date which wouldn't conflict with a baseball game I have tickets for on Sunday, so I went with the taping on Wednesday, May 19. The random call will come, if it happens, Monday the 17th, sometime between 6:00 and 9:00, which is perfect, since I don't work on Mondays and therefore don't have to be somewhere else at 8:00. (Yes, I know, but I don't have a cell phone.) I can just sleep with the phone next to my bed. Uh-oh, what if it loses its battery charge overnight? Now I'm worried.