LEWISTON – Amid the rants of an off-camera coach, the preening makeup people, the time pressure and the heavy wheel, keeping focused on the puzzle can be tough.

Such are the challenges of a “Wheel of Fortune” contestant.

“You have just five seconds to solve it, spin or buy a vowel,” says Wendy Brochu of Lewiston. “It’s the shortest five seconds there is.”

In the game show, there’s no time for politeness. No one says “please.” Instead, contestants are encouraged to show “the juice.”

“That’s what they call it,” said Brochu, referring to the giddy hopping and clapping that players on so many game shows display.

It seems that Brochu has plenty. On Nov. 4, the hairdresser taped an appearance on the TV game show. It’s scheduled to air Jan. 18.

Even Brochu’s children don’t know how much she won. She won’t say.

“I give people a range,” said Brochu. “It’s more than enough to buy sneakers. It’s not enough to buy a house.”

In some ways, the experience – not the outcome – was most important. After all, when she appeared on “The Price is Right” in 1988, she went “on down” to the front of the auditorium, but she never reached the stage because “I overbid $9 on a trash compactor.”

First, the screening

That was just a flirtation with a game show. Her main goal has been to get on “Wheel.”

“That’s where the money is,” said Brochu, who began corresponding with the show years ago. Then, this August, when the producers sent their recruiting staff to Bangor aboard the Wheelmobile, an RV decorated with images of Vanna White and Pat Sajak, she received an e-mail notice.

“I guess they kept my name on file,” said Brochu. She went to Bangor and competed with 150 other people for the chance to become a contestant.

Show staffers called her back at the beginning of October, when they met with 75 people at a Bar Harbor hotel. Based on a written puzzle test and a few moments of play, she was chosen as one of 15 possible contestants.

Two weeks later, a staffer called Brochu’s home. In three weeks, she arrived at the show’s Los Angeles studio.

The program shoots a week’s worth of shows, six in all, in a single day. She joined 17 other contestants and two alternates. Together, they endured four and a half hours of training.

They were shown the set and told where to stand and look. They were coached on playing the game. Buying vowels is usually a good idea, they learned.

And they practiced spinning the wheel.

“It doesn’t look like you’d need practice, but you do,” she said. “It’s heavier than it looks.”

Minutes before the taping began, letter-turner Vanna White stopped by to say hello to the contestants, dressed in a jogging suit and wearing her hair in a ponytail.

“She was like a regular person,” Brochu said.

After a few minutes in makeup chairs, the show began.

“The word is surreal,'” said Brochu, who had watched so many times.

A chat with Pat

Sajak was pleasant and “businesslike,” she said. When he introduced her, she described going skydiving on her 40th birthday.

“I think he liked that,” Brochu said.

However, her memory of the entire show is sketchy. There was so much to keep track of.

As the game went on, she tried focusing on where to stand and where to face before she bent over and spun the wheel.

During commercials, she and the others were backed away from their posts while crew people changed the pieces of the wheel. Meanwhile, a woman directed them to keep up the juice.

“We were the football team, and she was the coach,” Brochu said. The woman shouted at them: “You’re going too slow!”

Then, the show resumed.

For the contestants, the half-hour spins past. Take away the commercials and each lasts just 22 minutes. Remove the chitchat and prize descriptions and there are 15 minutes to play the game.

“I don’t even remember how many puzzles we solved,” she said. It was over so fast.

When the show airs, she plans to gather with friends in a local sports bar and watch it on a big screen.

Only then will her family learn what she won.