Son of a bee

My name is Scott Garceau, and I am not a very good speller.

Well, okay, I’m a so-so speller. In a way, though, I’ve become a victim of my job and of technology: I’ve come to rely on Spellcheck and other proofreading applications to correct my little boo-boos while writing or editing. I still read plenty of books, but I’ve noticed that the sheer processing of text in my editorial job means that, in my free reading time, I just skim over words I’ve already encountered, literally, hundreds of thousands of times over a lifetime. If the words look right at a glance, I move on; and perhaps that’s the first blow to literacy right there: complacency.

All this is leading up to a recent invitation I received to appear onstage for a recent performance of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Atlantis Productions’ popular musical that is now heading to Singapore for a series of shows. My sister-in-law coaxed me into doing it, and although I had no idea how the show was staged, I agreed. (Past guest spellers have included Lea Salonga, Jon Santos, Cheri Gil, Se. Chiz Escudero, Rajo Laurel, Raya Mananquil, Myrza Sison and Leo Rialp among many others. I like to think that they all did as well as I did.)

So there I was, on a Saturday afternoon, with my wife, waiting to get called onstage. Unbeknownst to me, other victims were in the audience with me (Ryan Eigenmann among them). We got called up one by one and took our seats in the back of the stage on folding chairs. We wore numbers around our necks.

The play, if you don’t know about it, involves a bunch of preternaturally gifted American school kids vying for the coveted national spelling bee trophy. They break into song and dance numbers between sweating over impossible words served up by former spelling bee champ Rona Liza Peretti (Cathy Azanza-Dy) and Vice Principal Douglas Panch (Joel Trinidad). Most of the time though, sitting onstage, we found ourselves squinting past the glaring spotlights, hoping to spot friendly faces in the crowd. (Fortunately, my wife was out there.)

It kind of took me back to an impromptu spelling bee that was held in my third grade class. It was a co-ed school, and one of my contenders was a pretty young girl whose name, for purposes of self-preservation, now escapes me. It came down to the two of us. I got the word “beautiful.” Looking over at my contender, I was temporarily addle-brained and I muffed it. I left out the “u” and found myself heading to my seat, dejected.

After that, of course, I never misspelled “beautiful” again.

Similarly, there are rules to The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, I found out. Someone took me aside before the show to inform me where I was to stand onstage, where to sit, how to exit, etc. When you’re given a word, you also get to ask a couple of questions of the judges: “Can I have the definition of the word?” and “Can you use the word in a sentence?”

Sitting up there, I watched the merriment unfold in front of me, and knew I would soon be next. But first, another “guest” contestant was called to the microphone. His word was “emperor.” A cinch.

Ah, I see, I thought. The words will gradually get harder. We’re gonna be up here all night!

I was called up next. First, I was introduced as “a writer for the Philippine STAR and the last surviving member of the Vanilla Ice fan club.” Joel looked at me sternly and said, “Your word is (and here I’ll refrain from spelling the word out just now, but it sounded to these ears exactly like ‘crappo’).”

Okay. I asked for the definition of the word. (“A small South American toad.”)

I stalled, fidgeted at the mike. Then I remembered the rules that had been given to the kids onstage earlier: they were allowed to ask the language of origin for each word in addition to the other two questions. So I did. “Uh… what’s the language of origin, please?” Joel looked at his notes and bluffed: “It’s… uh, Latin in origin, I believe.”

Well, that didn’t help. I thought maybe it was a joke word that was spelled just the way it sounded. So I shrugged and spelled out: “C-R-A-P-P-O.”

Wrong. Joel rang the bell and I looked like a complete feeb onstage. “No, I’m sorry, the correct spelling is C-R-A-P-A-U-D.”

Crapaud. Yes, that’s exactly how I felt. I paced over to the judge’s table (after first mock-weeping on the shoulder of the stage facilitator, who handed me a juice box for my troubles) and surrendered my number. (It briefly crossed my mind that, had Joel told me the word was French in origin, I might have had a better shot at it… but this is 20/20 hindsight.) I headed off the stage and went around the back and briefly considered hopping a cab home, but instead went to rejoin my wife in the audience. “Well, that was humiliating,” I muttered under my breath. “That’s exactly the way I would have spelled it,” Therese assured me. One more reason we were meant for each other, I suppose.

It only took me a couple more minutes to realize that this was the setup for Spelling Bee all along. Guest spellers are meant to get torpedoed, only some have to suffer longer onstage than others. I gritted my teeth as the next “guest spellers” got easy-peasy words like “kite” and “dog.” This seemed to piss off the kid spellers more than me, who had to tackle words like “palaestra,” “Weltanschauung” and “syzygy.” But I got to laugh as the three other “guests” were forced to join a conga line onstage and strike awkward vogue poses in the background. Eventually we all took our seats again and got to watch the play. Hats off to Lorenz Martinez (as William Barfee — “It’s pronounced ‘Bar-fay!”), Shiela Valderrama-Martinez (as six-language-speaking Marcy Park, who had the disconcerting habit of chatting me up onstage while we were seated), Felix Rivera (as “unfortunate erection” boy Chip Tolentino), Johann Dela Fuente (as savant-like Leaf Coneybear), Pheona Baranda (as Logainne Schwartzandgrubenierre) and Carla Guevera-Laforteza (as Olive Ostrovsky) who, under the direction of Bobby Garcia, all painfully capture the sensation of being under the brutal spotlight of linguistic performance. Good luck in Singapore, guys. 

And believe me, it’s a lot more enjoyable from down in the audience.