Chelsea competition spells victory for citywide youth

Bianca Herrand (left) of M.S. 192 looks to a judge after spelling a word, while Timothy Hohne of P.S. 206 waits his turn at last Thursday’s New York Daily News 43rd Annual Spelling Bee.

By Vivienne Leheny

Juelle Clyne tilts her head slightly, thinking. The plastic barrettes on her head are startlingly white in the dim light of the auditorium. She raises her chin toward the microphone, and in a clarion voice confidently repeats the word with her unusual emphasis: “ohm-ni-poh-tent. O-M-N-I-P-O-T-E-N-T. Omnipotent.” As the diminutive 9-year–old returns to her seat on the stage, I wildly scrawl in my notebook, “She’s adorble!”

In one fell stroke, two things are established: (1) I am a misguided speller (to put it charitably), and (2) the proudly unsentimental me has become a sucker for the spelling bee.

I’m late to the table on this phenomenon. Much of the country has caught on to the high drama that is the school spelling bee, as evidenced by the popularity of the recent movies Akeelah and the Bee (now playing on DVD at your local Starbucks), The Bee Season (based on a best-selling novel) and the documentary Spellbound. Meanwhile, the musical The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee has been hugely successful in its Broadway run. Having read that this last production “operates on two levels,” I brought my 8-year-old niece and felt superior in my generosity while enjoying the raunchy adult subtext. (So did my niece, as it turns out.)

My conversion from unapologetic beerejector (def: person who does not regard the spelling bee as a proper form of entertainment; origin: none, fabricated) to Bee Fan came on the first day of The Daily News 43rd Annual New York Spelling Bee, which arrived last Thursday and Friday at Chelsea’s High School of Fashion on West 24th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. I had no horse in this race, yet in a brief 90-minute span, my emotions coursed from anticipation, confusion, excitement, joy, disappointment and rising hysteria to, finally, pure elation.

Then I needed a drink.

Adding to the experience was the fact that the High School of Fashion, where display cases of royal blue and fuchsia gowns in prom-perfect satin and sequins predominated, seemed an incongruous setting for this test of 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th grade students, whose precocious minds had earned them slots in the citywide competition. The next and final stop for the two winners—one for each day of competition—is the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee Finals in Washington, D.C.

They’re all winners here!

Wearing cardboard placards around their necks bearing numbers from 1 through 41, last Thursday’s gorgeously gawky competitors shambled up to take their seats on the stage as their names were called alphabetically. That the competitors were drawn from four grade levels straddling at least two pre-adolescent growth spurts made for a great visual. Some of the kids towered two and half feet over their fellow spellers. Overall, the girls appeared to have the edge in height and self-confidence—perhaps the last moment in life when this is so poignantly and incontrovertibly apparent. Two of these girls happened to be numbers 1 and 2 in the lineup: 14-year-old Sophia Abbott, of St. Saviour School in Brooklyn, and 12-year-old Adrian Acevedo, of M.S. 54 in Manhattan.

Since the Daily News competition includes both public and private schools, almost half the competitors were dressed in parochial school uniforms suggesting a potential Battle of the Tartans. There was an awkward moment when one child’s affiliation was announced as “Home school/Christian educators” and a tiny buzz of negativity surged somewhere in the audience. Fortunately, it quickly passed, but my appetite was whetted. There was passion here—a warrior spirit was rising, and I was witness.

Ronnie Solow, the “pronouncer” for the competition, informed the audience that there had been a recent rule change made by the Scripps Howard people—something to do with the last round of elimination, misspelled words and a second shot at redemption—which I didn’t quite follow. It was like explaining to a hamburger eater the myriad regulatory challenges of importing genuine Kobe steak. Who cares? Bring on the meat! But before taking her seat at the pronouncer’s table, Solow was quick to remind us all that these competitors were already winners, having taken first or second place in at least two prior competitions at the school and regional district levels.

Repeat that, please?

As their bright, pensive faces stared out at us from the stage, the children were cautioned by Solow that the pace would be quick: “We keep it moving,” she warned. True to her word, she ran them through a practice round that went shockingly fast: In some cases, the children were hearing their words as they were still walking up to one of the two microphones at center stage. It was in this practice round that the first inkling of audio problems emerged.

The three judges—all current or retired Department of Education employees—sat at a table stage right, while Solow was at a table at stage left. Given the position of the tables and the center stage mics, the disparity between the fixed mic stands and the crazily assorted heights of the kids, plus the periodic inaudibility of the shiest competitors, it was a real feat to parse what was being spelled at times.

Once the competition began in earnest, the audio problems continued. Several times the judges had to change their initial “incorrect” ruling on a word after the audio playback confirmed the spelling was, in fact, correct. At one point, the spelling bee was brought to a halt while the sound-man waged war with the sound system.

Add to all this Mrs. Solow’s rather distinct New Yawka’ accent, and you have a recipe for some interesting theater. Of particular note was her pronunciation of “ramen” (for the noodles) as rhyming with Damon (as in Matt Damon who, to my knowledge, has not starred in a spelling bee film). “Antibiotic” also received three adjusted pronunciations before the bewildered child asked, “Could you repeat the word?” and took a crack at the spelling (she got it right).

One mother in the audience leaned toward me, offering a gentle reminder that the running of a spelling bee is not a precise science and that humans can make mistakes, even given the best intentions. She is, of course, right. But my inner 12-year-old felt less forgiving.

What’s the origin?

I had met Tim Hohne, of P.S. 206 in Brooklyn, in the audience before the competition began, and he assured me that he was, in fact, “nervous.” You wouldn’t have guessed it from his demeanor onstage though: He was quick and sure-footed in his spellings through four rounds that winnowed the 40-odd competitors to three boys and seven girls. It was in the fifth round that Tim paused for the first time, after Solow pronounced for him the word “howitzer.” He asked Solow for the definition and then for its origin. “Czech to German to Dutch,” she replied. Tim, unfamiliar with the word, understandably guessed the spelling as “H-A-U-W-I-T-Z-E-R.” Later, he was sanguine about the loss, saying that what confused him was the “German to Dutch” origin description: “Aren’t they almost the same thing?”

In the next round, Sophia was knocked out on the word “macramé.” She’d sailed through “mystique,” “falsetto” and “gestapo,” among other words, always calm and graceful in her delivery. Once the bee was over, she confessed it was “very nerve wracking” to go first in each round and then wait for her turn again, but when she was actually spelling she felt “oddly relaxed.”

“I always close my eyes when I’m spelling so that I can visualize the word, and when I was up there, I just closed my mind to everything—almost like in the movies, where everything becomes silent for one person while the world is rushing around them.” Sophia’s only regret was that this was the last year she was eligible to compete under the Scripps Howard guidelines.

Scripps Howard had provided the children a study manual for this bee, titled Spell It!, which contains about 700 words. Some of the children also referenced a second book from the company called Paidea, which covers 4,100 words. For the truly ambitious, the spelling bee Website for Scripps Howard (www.spellingbee.com) offers the free and downloadable “Consolidated Word List,” which runs 789 pages and contains 23,414 words. As Tim said to me, “How can you call that list ‘consolidated’?”

With that many words, the context of a word’s usage sometimes can make all the difference. “Nebbish? May I have that in a sentence?” one child asked Solow, who obliged: “The father in a television sitcom is often portrayed as a bumbling nebbish.” And other times, context is no help at all, as demonstrated by the illustrative sentence for “adonize”: “Gram assured Grandpa that he needed nothing to adonize himself.”

Down to the wire

At Round 7, five competitors were still standing, including Juelle and Adrian. At the end of Round 7, they were all still there. Round 8 came and went without elimination. By Round 9, my fingernails were bitten to the quick.

Juelle approached the mic, and Solow pronounced “aggregate.” The girl turned to look at Solow. “Ag-greh-gate?” she carefully said, lifting with a question. Solow nodded and repeated, “A-ggreh-gate.” Juelle hesitated. Meantime, I suffered a fatalistic flash, because I realized what she was attempting to clarify, and what she now understood the response to be: “A-G-R-E-G-A-T-E. Aggregate,” she said.

The bell rang, and Juelle was out. I felt my heart breaking.

But there was no time to mourn, as nine hair-raising rounds whizzed by with the remaining four competitors. Then, in round 18, one child was eliminated on “psalm” (Nicole likely would have gotten that one). In the next round, “perjury” claimed the third-place competitor. This left the lanky, strawberry blonde Adrian and the compact, dark-haired Marc Francis, of St. Bernadette’s School, onstage. The television camera lights went on. Both children blinked at the assault. But Solow waits for no man: “Wrestle” she said. And Adrian spelled it right.

Five minutes and some 20 words later, Marc tripped up on “valise.” Adrian was then given a shot but also misspelled it. Back to the lightning round. Then Marc missed “subclavian” and Adrian spelled it right! But before being declared winner, she needed to correctly spell “nepotism.” “N-E-B-O-T-I-S-M.” The television cameras were turned off.

Back to the lighting round. Three minutes more and Marc misspelled “pecuniary.” Adrian nailed it. Solow intoned, “For the win. . . spurious,” and the camera lights clicked back on. “S-P-U-R-I-O-U-S. Spurious.”

“Congratulations,” said Solow. “You just won the spelling bee.”

Adrian now heads off to face 287 competitors from across the country in the national spelling finals on May 30 and 31. One of these will be her M.S. 54 schoolmate Paul Lindseth, who won the second day of the competition, on Friday. The Daily News reports that this is the first time in its spelling bee’s history that two students from the same school have advanced to the nationals together.

“I had a dream the night before the competition that I was standing in front of an audience and they were all applauding,” Adrian told me several days afterward. “It’s funny, I know, but I dreamed I won the spelling bee.”