'Jeopardy!' features Jericho author in clue

Jericho author Ellen Meister was in “Jeopardy!” on Tuesday. Not on it. In it.

Under the category “Authors as Book Characters” on the popular syndicated game show, contestant Sharon Stone — not the actor but an early-childhood intervention manager from Round Rock, Texas — chose the clue reading, “In Ellen Meister’s ‘Dorothy Parker Drank Here,’ the plucky title scribe literally & wittily haunts the halls of this hotel.” Kate Palumbo of Amawalk, New York, in Westchester County, correctly answered in the form of a question, “What is The Algonquin?”

“I now can answer the age-old question about whether or not people get the heads-up when they're going to be mentioned on ‘Jeopardy!’ ” says Meister brightly by phone the next day. “The answer is: They don’t!”

The author of eight books including that 2015 novel starring the ghost of the titular writer and Algonquin Round Table wit, Meister, 66, did receive an alert — not from anyone connected with the show but from one of her 4,800 Facebook friends, who saw the episode in a market where “Jeopardy!” airs earlier than it does on WABC/7 in New York, where it runs weeknights at 7 p.m.

“I got a Facebook message from someone about an hour before it went on the air,” Meister recalls, “and this woman said, ‘Congratulations! You are a “Jeopardy!” clue tonight!’ And I thought, ‘She has to be mistaken.’ I wrote back and asked, ‘Are you sure?’ And she responded, ‘Yes, they mentioned you by name.’ I still didn't quite believe it until I saw it for myself.”

When she did, “I just couldn't believe it was really happening. I'm staring at it. Your brain goes kind of blank. I know they spelled my name correctly — that was one of the first things I thought,” says the author, who is married to financial-services professional Michael Mogavero, with whom she has three adult children.

“Dorothy Parker Drank Here” is her second book featuring the famously witty short-story writer, poet, critic and screenwriter, who lunched with other literary lights at the Manhattan hotel The Algonquin in the 1920s and ’30s, following “Farewell, Dorothy Parker” (2013). Meister previously wrote the Long Island-set “Secret Confessions of the Applewood PTA" (2006), “The Smart One” (2008) and “The Other Life” (2011).

Born in the Bronx but raised in Jericho, returning there after college in Buffalo and a stint in Forest Hills, Queens, Meister had “discovered Dorothy Parker when I was a young teenager, and I really think it was her view on heartbreak that captured me.” Still a literary cult figure, Parker, who died in 1967 at age 73, continued to appeal to Meister for “her wit, her social conscience, all of it.”

Two of Meister’s more recent novels, “Love Sold Separately” (2020) and “The Rooftop Party” (2021), each star Shopping Channel host and aspiring actor Dana Barry, whose amateur sleuthing often takes her to Long Island locales. Meister’s latest, “Take My Husband” (2022), is a dark suburban comedy set primarily in Plainview.

While her upcoming “Divorce Towers” is set in Beverly Hills, Meister expects future works will return to her home base. “It's been such a joy and a pleasure,” she says, “writing books that take place in or around Long Island.” And that is not in the form of a question.