Connecticut children’s book author a contestant on Monday’s ‘Jeopardy!’

When Marilyn Singer was accepted as a contestant on “Jeopardy!,” she was extensively interviewed so that the game show’s host could prepare for the mid-game segment where the players share a little about themselves.

Singer asked who would be hosting her episode. She was told, “We don’t know.” It made a difference because Singer had separate anecdotes about each of the show’s two alternating hosts, Ken Jennings and Mayim Bialik.

Singer appears on Monday’s show and maybe after that if she won her first game. Contestants are not allowed to divulge the outcome of the games until after they have aired. “Jeopardy!” airs locally on weeknights at 7 p.m. on WTNH.

Singer is a children’s book author who has homes in Washington, Connecticut, and Brooklyn, New York. She says she was once at a book expo when she saw Jennings (who besides being a “Jeopardy!” host is one of the show’s top champions), ran up to him and blurted out that she had once won $25 in a trivia contest. As for Bialik, once when Singer was asked who she’d like to have narrate the audiobook version of one of her books, she suggested Sarah Silverman or Bialik. (Singer ended up narrating the book herself.)

Bialik ended up being the host when Singer appeared, so that’s the anecdote that got used.

Marilyn and her husband Steve have had their place in Washington since the late 1990s. On their very first weekend in Connecticut, Stephen Sondheim walked up to them in a video store when they had their pet poodle with them. “That’s my favorite breed,” Sondheim said. When the poodle licked the great composer’s face, she whispered to the dog “You have kissed the face of God.”

This wasn’t Singer’s first crack at appearing on “Jeopardy!”

“I auditioned years ago and got a callback but didn’t get picked,” she said. “Then you have to wait for at least 18 months before you can try again. I took the test again and got a callback last August. Now they do Zoom callbacks.

“Because I had done a live audition before, I knew that they ask you to hold something in your hand that you can pretend is the buzzer. I always use a toilet roll holder as a buzzer. In the practice game, the person running it said ‘Is that a cigar?’ and I said ‘No, it’s a toilet roll holder’ and everyone laughed through the whole game. I knew I’d done well,” she said.

“Then they called and said ‘Can you be on the show in November or December?’ and I said ‘No!,” because I had so many gigs around my writing. They called me again in February and then I could do it.”

A prolific author whose books include “Face Relations: Eleven Stories About Seeing Beyond Color,” “Stay True: Short Stories for Strong Girls,” “A Raven Named Grip” (about Charles Dickens and Edgar Allen Poe), “Tallulah’s Tutu,” the recent “Awe-some Days: Poems About the Jewish Holidays” and dozens of others, Singer holds a book signing event every year on the Saturday after Thanksgiving at the Hickory Stick Bookshop in Washington Depot.

She and her husband are both “dance fanatics” who like to go to go to swing, ballroom and Latin dance events, though they don’t compete. Before she had gone to Los Angeles to be on “Jeopardy!” the couple had been there to be in the audience for an episode of “Dancing With the Stars.”

When it came down to the actual appearance, Singer recalled she kept telling her husband “I can’t do this.”

“It was agonizing picking out the outfits,” she said. “Jeopardy!” asks contestants to bring three changes of clothes with them in case they appear on more than one episode.

Once Singer arrived, she felt at ease. “I felt really good about being selected, and every single person was nice. They give you another 50-question test, and it has nothing to do with whether you get on the show, but my husband thought it was to try to get you to bond with the other contestants,” she said.

“Going to hair and makeup is hilarious. I talked to the wardrobe guy who said he was retiring after this season and moving to West Hartford. He wanted to see Litchfield, and we talked about that,” she said. “I’m still in touch with some of the people I played against. I’ve joined the Women of Jeopardy Facebook group.”