Writing Life

On Monday nights my wife and I can usually be found in front of the television watching The Antiques Roadshow on PBS. The premise of the show is simple: ordinary people bring objects that they believe are old and valuable to a makeshift TV studio where the items are evaluated and appraised by professional antiquarians. Julie and I like watching the show because it teaches us so much about history. But the materialist inside each of us also likes knowing just what the heck all that old stuff is worth in cold hard cash. We almost never miss the show, but tonight we were tempted to do so. Tennis is our favorite spectator sport. Andy Roddick is our favorite American tennis player. And tonight he was scheduled to compete against Croatian Marin Cilic in a quarterfinal match at the Australian Open. The tennis match and the Roadshow both began at eight p.m. In the end, we figured we could afford to miss an hour of the tennis match. With two good players like Roddick and Cilic, the match was likely to last three hours or more. Which would mean that we’d still be able to see two thirds of it.

Julie and I don’t just watch The Antiques Roadshow; we compete against each other in a home version of our own invention called What’s It Worth? Near the end of each Roadshow appraisal, shortly before the revelation of the appraised item’s worth, we will both call out our own estimate of the object’s resale value. I write these numbers down on a scratch pad I keep on a table beside the couch. When the professional appraiser gives his estimate of the item’s worth, I write down that number too. The appraisers always give a low-end value and a high-end value. Julie and I pay attention only to the high-end value. Thus, if Julie says an antique vase is worth ten thousand dollars, I say it is worth eight thousand dollars, and the appraiser says it is worth between eight and ten thousand dollars, Julie wins. At the end of the show, we look at all the numbers on the scratch pad and see which of us did best in our appraisals – which, to be honest, are often nothing more than wild guesses.

The competition got off to a bad start for me. A 16th-century Tibetan carved box that I appraised at $10,000 and Julie appraised at $8,000 had a high-end value of exactly $8,000 according to the Roadshow’s antique Tibetan box specialist. Likewise a miniature Queen Anne chest that I appraised at $12,000 and Julie appraised at $7,500, received a high-end professional appraisal of $8,000. A painting by an anonymous old master that I appraised at $25,000 and Julie appraised at $35,000, was valued at $50,000. A bunch of old bicycle company catalogs that I thought couldn’t possibly be worth more than a thousand dollars were appraised at $8,000 dollars, four times what Julie estimated but eight times what I estimated. We were roughly fifteen minutes into the battle before I finally won a round. I estimated the value of old gold pocket watch at $10,000, which exactly matched the professional antiquarian’s high-end appraisal. After amassing a big lead over me, Julie got overconfident and began making crucial mistakes. When a table made by Gustav Stickley came up for appraisal, Julie cockily asserted that it couldn’t possibly be worth a penny less than $20,000. I took a more conservative approach, estimating its value at $5,000. My guess was just $500 over the professional appraiser’s estimate of $4,500. The battle raged on until I was just one point behind Julie. That’s when a ratty-looking poster from an old Janis Joplin concert came up for appraisal. It looked like every other 1960s psychedelic rock-and-roll poster I had ever seen. And I’ve seen hundreds of them at antique paper fairs and flea markets and collectibles sales. I estimated the poster’s value at $500 tops. Julie believed the poster to be worth a lot more money than that. She could have played it safe by guessing $501, but we have a gentleman’s agreement between us not to engage in that kind of a cutthroat one-upmanship. The agreement requires each player to make an honest effort to guess at the true high-end appraised value of the item under examination. Thus, Julie estimated the poster’s current value at $5,000. I was sure she had just blown her lead and allowed me to tie up the competition. I would have been willing to swear on my grandmother’s grave that a mass-produced poster blemished with tack holes and tape marks and water damage could not be worth anywhere near $5,000. And, as it happened, I was right. The poster turned out to be worth much more than $5,000. The Roadshow’s poster expert estimated its value at $10,000, which guaranteed Julie a victory in tonight’s edition of What’s It Worth?

The final item up for consideration was a painting by Cornelius Krieghoff, a Canadian artist neither of had ever heard of. The painting didn’t look like much to me, a sentimental scene of winter that resembled something from a Currier and Ives paint-by-numbers kit. But I know almost nothing at all about fine art. What I do know, however, is that The Antiques Roadshow often concludes with a gasp-inducing segment wherein a fairly modest-looking item generates an astoundingly high financial appraisal. Bearing this in mind, I estimated the painting’s value at $50,000. Julie estimated its value at $30,000. But Colleene Fesko, the Roadshow’s paintings and drawings expert, placed the high-end value of the painting at $350,000! At that point I tried to argue with Julie that, since the total value of the objects I had won points for was much higher than the value of the objects she had won points for, I ought to be considered the winner of tonight’s competition. Julie told me I should be ashamed to even take a point for my Krieghoff appraisal, seeing as how my estimate was off by a whopping $300,000. In the end I was forced to concede defeat.

When the Roadshow was over, we tuned the television to ESPN 2, where the Roddick-Cilic match was being aired. At that point Cilic was on the verge of winning the first set in a tiebreak. Julie didn’t want to risk staying up until midnight or later just to see her beloved Andy Roddick defeated by a Croatian upstart. Instead she opted to go to sleep while she was still basking in the glow of her What’s It Worth victory. I left the television on, sans sound, and came into my office to write this blog entry. As I was composing this deathless prose masterpiece, Roddick fell behind Cilic two sets to zero. Things looked as bad for Andy as they had for me at the beginning of our What’s It Worth showdown. But, just like me, Andy gradually clawed his way back into the competition. He won sets three and four to force a decisive fifth set. But, also like me, after nearly staging an impressive comeback, he fell short in the end, losing the last set 3-6.

In some ways, though, I am luckier than Roddick. He’ll have to wait until the French Open, which begins in late May, before getting another shot at winning a Grand Slam tennis tournament. I’ll have to wait only until next Monday for another shot at winning a What’s It Worth? competition. Of course it doesn’t carry the two-million-dollar prize that a Grand Slam tennis victory brings, but the satisfaction of besting one’s know-it-all spouse in a battle of wits is, as every married person knows, priceless.