Weekend Edition Puzzle

My Sunday mornings are all pretty much the same.  I get up at about seven in the morning, dress in workout clothes, and head downstairs for a small bowl of cereal, a glass of Ovaltine, and a quick check of my favorite blogs.  I’m in the car listening to NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday just as it comes on, and my commute allows me to listen to the intro, NPR’s news, my local news, and the “voices in the news” segment before I pull into the health club parking lot.  I teach a step class, then go upstairs and teach a yoga class.  I log my classes in the office, then am back in the car on my way home just in time to hear Leanne Hanson and Will Shortz do the weekly puzzle.

I don’t enter the puzzles, though I’ve been enjoying them for a couple of years now.  Honestly, more often than not, I’ve completely forgotten the weekly challenge by the time I get in the house - chocolate chip pancakes offer up a wicked distraction, I tell you!  Anyway, I’ve always wanted to enter the puzzle because I get a HUGE kick out of playing the thing on the way home and, usually, I’m pretty darned good at it (mostly because they play word games, and… well… you know…).

Last week’s puzzle was a dreaded MATH challenge (boo, hiss!  Will lost me when he said that we could use exponents to solve the challenge.  Exponents?!  What the hell’s an exponent**?!), but this week’s puzzle is an anagram.  I love anagrams - Punkin’ Pie brought home the letters for “valentines” last week and, between Mr. Chili and me, we made upwards of 125 words - so I was all over this.

The challenge is to take the letters in “melancholiac,” add an “r,” and rearrange the letters to form the name of a famous actress.

I figured it out with Scrabble letters while eating lunch with the girls.  They’ve never heard of the resulting name, but I had and, dammit!  I figured it out!

I submitted my answer to the NPR website about five minutes ago.  A good many of the people who get to play puzzle seem to be like me - they play on their own for years and never submit an answer.  It seems that a lot of these folks get called the first time they do send a response in, though, and I’m hoping that works in my favor.  I’d really love to get the fun, word-geeky prizes they give away….

(**and yes, I DO know what an exponent is - I even know what they do - so don’t flood my comments with math lessons, please…)