8:10
A whisper game ends in a homecoming
Number 418 gets called on The Tonight Show, and the woman in that seat would clearly rather it had been anyone else's. more
Jimmy Fallon has filled the whole audience with veterans and their families for Veterans Day, and he needs a partner for the Whisper Challenge. Seat 418 belongs to India Horne. She stays put, and the room waits through a long pause.
Fallon asks if there's no one at 418 and whether he should choose another. The cheering starts instead, and India comes down the stairs with the face of a person called to the front of the class without raising her hand.
"This is serious?" she asks. "Is this on TV?" It is, and Fallon says he has never seen anyone react like this in his lifetime. She's on active duty, and a vet as well, and her husband is in the military too, deployed right now.
She asks to hear the rules one more time. "I'm trying to focus. This is a lot." Fallon offers to pick another ping-pong ball if it would make it easier, and someone in the crowd shouts, "You got this!"
One player wears headphones with loud music playing, and the other reads a phrase for them to guess from their lips. India goes first and gets "I'm a little teapot" after a few tries. Then Fallon puts the headphones on, and her "Lady Gaga" turns into "lay cakey" before he lands it. Every time the crowd claps, she glances over at them.
The third phrase is Fallon's to read. "Your husband is behind you." She tries "huh" and "tour" before it lands, and then she turns around. He's standing right there in uniform, and she says, "Oh, my God. Look at you."
Save"I was gonna get you one day," her husband tells her. Fallon tells him she almost did not want to come down from the seats, and Cory says he saw it all from backstage.
There is more. India had been trying to raise money to redo the family room in the children's intensive care unit at Walter Reed, the military medical center in Maryland, and T-Mobile, the show's partner for the night, will cover all of it. Then the kids come out, shouting for their daddy.
The draw was never left to chance, of course. Plenty of people say the part they replay is that walk down the stairs, from a woman sure she had been picked for the wrong reason. She had been picked for the best one.
