After the first year of doing the Match Game rehearsals himself, Gene asked me if I would mind doing them.

Of course I'd love doing the Match Game rehearsals! (That way Gene could rest between shows and enjoy lunch with the celebs. We did the whole week in one day. Two shows, Monday and Tuesday, in the morning. Lunch break, then the Wednesday, Thursday & Friday shows.) We had stand-ins for the celebrities too. The idea was to run through the game for the benefit of the contestants. How to enter, where to place your cards after you wrote your answer, how to dispose of the used cards, etc. We used old Match Game questions for the rehearsals. That's me at Gene's Podium. And that's the old Match Game set. Back then in the NY version we had two teams, each with a celebrity captain and two contestants.