You want to be a millionaire, I want to be a millionaire and Patrick Fernan wants to be a millionaire.

The difference between you, me and Fernan is that he may already be a millionaire. Isn't that right, Patrick?

"I can't tell you," Fernan was saying this week.

Last fall, after two years of trying, Fernan, 43, of McFarland, finally made it into the hot seat of the ABC show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" Fernan's episode will run at 11:30 a.m. Monday on WKOW-TV (Ch. 27). He's not allowed to say how he did before the show airs.

In any case, it wasn't easy getting in the hot seat. I mean, it literally wasn't easy. Fernan said there was something about the contestant's chair -- maybe it's set at a weird angle or wasn't anchored properly -- that made it difficult to settle into.

"The hardest part of the whole thing was the stress of getting into that chair," Fernan said. "I had seen two people fall trying to sit down. I didn't want to fall getting into a chair on national television."

If his name sounds familiar, that may be because for much of the 1990s, Fernan was one of the most active directors and actors on the Madison theater scene. A city native, he graduated from Madison Memorial in 1982 and then attended UW-Madison, both as an undergraduate and then as a law student. His first Madison stage appearance came as a UW-Madison junior in a 1985 Strollers Theatre production.

By the '90s, he was seemingly everywhere, acting or directing in some 40 productions during the decade. In 1997, Fernan and his actor friend Lee Waldhart, who had earlier run a dinner theater, took over the operation of the teetering Madison Theater Guild and made it viable again.

By 1999, he was telling Wisconsin State Journal writer Nadine Goff he was tired and wanted to pull back a bit from all the theater work.

Fernan always had other jobs, of course. He worked for the State Patrol, the state Department of Revenue, and he is currently operations manager for the state Division of Motor Vehicles.

Fernan is also, need it be said, a trivia buff. In 2003, he qualified for "Jeopardy" and flew to Los Angeles for the show's taping. He wound up winning three episodes and a total of $58,000. Fernan loved sitting backstage and talking to the crew, many of whom had worked on legendary game shows like "Family Feud" and "The Gong Show."

The "Millionaire" auditions were outside of Chicago. Fernan first tried in the summer of 2005. He and his cousin, Peggy Mooney, got up at 4 a.m. and drove to a casino just over the Indiana border where the audition was held. There were hundreds of people in line. When they got in, they were asked to fill out a 30-question multiple-choice test.

The top 15 percent finishers of the written test moved on to a personal interview. This varied from his experience on "Jeopardy!," Fernan said, where just the top 5 percent of finishers of a 50-question fill-in-the-blank test moved on.

In the "Millionaire" interview, Fernan was asked about his job. The idea is to be lively and project yourself as a good TV presence, but that proved difficult. "It's hard to make the DMV exciting," he said. Some weeks later, he got a postcard saying he had not been chosen for the show.

Fernan went back a year later -- the second audition was at Medieval Times in Schaumburg. He made the interview round again but again it did not go well.

The third year -- this past summer -- Fernan wasn't even going to go but he got talked into it. It was at Medieval Times again and this time when he made the interview, he steered the conversation to his two young children, Sean and Kylie, and like any dad, Patrick shines when discussing his kids. The third time was the charm: he was picked for the show.

In October, Patrick and his wife, Lisa, flew to New York City for the taping. You travel and stay on your own dime. They tape five shows a day over several days and the contestants don 't know in what order they'll be picked. Fernan sat through the whole first day -- with his "phone a friend" lifeline people near phones across the country -- without getting selected. But on the second day, he was the second person picked.

Fernan got off to a good start by getting in the chair without falling. But then it got tough.

"It was a lot more intense than Jeopardy!,'" he said. "And less enjoyable. Get one question wrong and you're done."

The host, Meredith Vieira, was nice and even sent Fernan a handwritten note back in Madison thanking him for being on the show. Still, Fernan's main memory is the high-pressure atmosphere.

"You sit down in that chair," he said, "and it's like all the intelligence drains from your head."