H. vs. the Spello-Dragon

(H. won his school spelling bee in Jan. and competed in the Regional Spelling Bee yesterday).

Maybe I’m biased, but sometimes it’s nice to have an English professor as a university president. Not only did ours come down at 9am on a Sat. morning to address a bunch of grade-schoolers and their parents, but he also gave a kickass speech. “There’s going to be a basketball game later today,” he said, “and there will be big crowds and a lot of cheering. But I want you to remember that while basketball is a skill, language is what makes us human. You all are the athletes of the mind.”

And the spelling bee was certainly a parade of humanity: every size and sex and color of kid between about eight and fourteen. Those ages will give you a heck of a lot of human variety: some of the middle-school girls were easily twice the height of the elementary school boys.

I’ve been resisting seeing that documentary about the spelling bee, or even Akeelah and the Bee, because I didn’t want to be exposed to any more evidence of the craziness of these things. But now that I’ve witnessed a couple, I can see why dramatists are drawn to them.

Spelling has a special kind of crazy, internal drama. Each kid has his or her own style: fast, slow; staring into space or using their fingers to sketch the word on their palms; going deep, deep inside themselves looking for the right sequence. Sometimes, when they don’t know a word, they just railroad through, cobbling phonemes together in a desperate drive to get to the other side; sometimes, there’s a terrible pause, when they know they’ve said a letter wrong, a momentary dead space, then a decrescendo as they trail away towards the end. It’s mesmerizing—halfway between a basket of adorably wriggling puppies and a train wreck.

H. didn’t win, but he did great. He was remarkably poised, but so were almost all the kids. I kept expecting someone to burst into tears and run off the stage—either in disappointment, or just unable to stand the pressure and scrutiny—but no one did. He got through four rounds (“mirage,” “rouge,” “cafeteria” and “sashimi”), and was in the fifth round, one of only 12 kids left from the original 52, when he was stymied by “Provolone” (a cheese henceforth banished from our house). He exited gracefully, and was rightfully proud of his performance.

All the boys were gone after that round, and all but one of the elementary school kids. It had devolved into a battle of the geeky middle-school girls. They were all gawky and adorable and anxious, and the crowd loved them, gave each one a standing ovation when she got knocked out. It came down to a battle between an eighth-grade girl who was miniature version of Chloe Sevigny in “Big Love” (ramrod posture, righteous diction, floor-length skirt and hair scraped into a tight bun) and one who was a little more “Sons of Anarchy” (baggy black t-shirt and sneakers, waist-length lank blond hair). The Chloe Sevigny girl won, in a real nail-biter, and her teacher burst into tears behind me.

Just by chance, the night before we had read (again) the scene in Harry Potter and Goblet of Fire where Harry has to face the Hungarian Horntail with only his wand. What if he had to spell words at the same time, we wondered. What if he had to spell “nenuphar”? What if it were a spello-dragon? These kids would have taken it down.