Three minutes passed before she could convince herself to get up. Actually, less than three seconds. Numb and disoriented, Karen Beddings moved toward the aisle as her friends cheered: "You'll be all right, we'll help you."

The next contestant, some guy with a strange name, rushed past her toward the stage, waving his arms and squealing with excitement.

Seeing this, Beddings thought to herself, I guess I'm supposed to be doing that too, eh? So she ran and yelled and waved like all good contestants do.

The fact that she was being videotaped on the game show "The Price is Right" didn't quite sink in for Beddings, a Penn State student who spent her spring break in southern California.

Although she didn't take home a new car or a yacht or a trip to Cancun, she did make out like a bandit.

But she is painfully aware that all her relatives and friends will click on their VCRs tomorrow when her victory is aired across the nation. Locally, the show will air at 11 a.m. on Channel 10 (CBS).

As Beddings remembers it, the whole deal went so quickly that she didn't even think about kissing host Bob Barker --who she said looked too "covered with makeup" to kiss anyway.

"The stage is so small, it doesn't even seem like you're on national TV," said the Penn State junior majoring in hotel, restaurant and institutional management. "I didn't really know what I was doing -- I've only seen the show like once or twice."

Beddings won a stove, a telescope, a computer, a dinette set, 12 pairs of sneakers and, of course, the $100 she pulled out of Bob's pocket when she hit her first bid on the nose.

She never thought she'd hear the announcer bellow out her name and beckon her down the ramp toward fame and fortune. "The Price is Right" combines estimating the correct price of consumer products with familiar games like monopoly or blackjack.

Beddings and a group of friends from Penn State were staying at her roommate's brother's house in Seal Beach, Calif., during spring break. As she described it, the idea of appearing on the game show began as a lark.

"The night before these two guys from Penn State that we went over with called up and said do you want to go to 'The Price is Right?" she said. "They told us to wear our Penn State shirts."

Beddings didn't know this was to be a full day's task. It started by waking up at 4:30 a.m., driving about an hour to pick up the guys, and facing another hour's bumper-to-bumper drive down an eight-lane highway to Los Angeles. There was no time for a shower, and she barely remembered to put on her ripped-up Penn State lacrosse sweatshirt.

Beddings and her six companions stood in line outside the CBS studios from 7:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. and got tickets for that day's second taping of "The Price is Right." They "people-watched" to pass the time.

"We met a couple of people from 'The Bold and the Beautiful' and 'The Young and the Restless,' " she said. "We were standing in line with a lot of older people who watch ("The Price is Right") all the time -- you could tell."

After getting their tickets, they went for lunch at the nearby Hard Rock Cafe and returned at 3 p.m. Each prospective audience member had to undergo a short interview consisting of the following questions: "Where are you from? What do you do?"

"It wasn't Bob asking the questions; it was some other guy, and the producer sat behind him writing it all down," she said.

They finally got inside and took their seats. Beddings found the TV studio much smaller than she originally thought it would be -- "about as big as a classroom at the Forum." A spokeswoman for the show said last week that the studio actually holds about 320 audience members.

When the cameras started up, the impromptu Penn State delegation went into a "hi, mom" routine.

"We were just up in the audience in the third row above the contestants' row. We were waving at the camera like idiots. It's so embarassing, this is going to be all over national TV," she said.

And then she got called up. She made it through the first stage of bidding by hitting the price of one item right on the nose. Barker invited her up on stage and asked her to reach into his pocket for a $100 bill. During the break, Barker asked for the bill back, explaining that it was his only one.

"Here, I'll take the $100 back -- we'll send you a check," he said.

She isn't quite sure how she got through the poker part of the game, because it didn't resemble any poker she's ever seen. It was an off-shoot of poker that involved four prizes. She was asked to pick a prize and the price of the prize would constitute a poker hand. She remembers audience members saying "Pick the dinette set! The dinette set!" She picked the dinette set and the price was revealed to be $999, a good poker hand in anybody's book.

Having won that round, she later got to spin the wheel. Although she didn't make it to the "Showcase Showdown" at the end of the show, she said it was still fun to watch people during the commercial breaks. Barker takes questions from the audience, Beddings said --usually cynical queries about his celebrated animal-rights activism.

"People would ask, 'Hey, Bob, do you have any pets?' and he would say, 'Yep, and they're all spayed and neutered,' " she said.

So far, she's gotten the $100 check. The range and the telescope have been delivered to her home address, and she expects the computer, the tennis shoes and the dinette set will be waiting there after the semester is over.

Beddings said the experience has given her a better perspective on TV.

"When I was there in the audience, I was thinking, 'If I got up on TV, I would die,' " she said. "Now it seems strange that people are making such a big deal of it."