Where have I been? Why, starring in a touring company of a Broadway musical. For one night, anyway.
Since we’d not really had that much in the way of evenings out at a couple in the last weeks, I bought some last-minute cheap tickets for Saturday night to The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, the William Finn musical in which twenty-something actors portray varied elementary school students taking part in a high-pressure challenge of their vocabulary prowess. It’s a funny and sometimes raunchy one-act production that I’d always at some point wanted to see. Somehow I even managed to keep the Mont from finding out exactly what our activity for the evening was going to be; it wasn’t until we actually pulled up into the theater’s parking lot that he finally saw a sign advertising the show.
Unfortunately for us, we’d arrived a little bit early, and the moment we stumbled into the lobby, one of the show’s sharp-eyed procurers spotted us. You see, one ofSpelling Bee’s gimmicks is that every show they select a handful of audience members who sit on the bleachers among the actors. These poor slobs get quizzed on their spelling abilities along with the cast’s fictional characters. I, who loathe the very concept of audience participation, knew the set-up and yet somehow considered it unlikely that in a theater of two thousand seats, either the mont or I might be selected for this particular chore. But here we were, both dressed up and sweet-smelling, being interrogated about our seat numbers and our occupations, and then being hustled to an official-looking booth where a representative of the show questioned us further. “Aw, come on,” the Mont said, when I seemed reluctant. “It’ll be fun. Nothing will happen."
“Fine,” I finally agreed, sighing. “It’ll just be a cute experience.”
Our turn came at the interview booth. What kind of writer was I, the man wanted to know, and what kind of musician was the Mont? Did we consider ourselves as the kind of people who kept up on current events? (Yes, said the Mont, because he is. I, on the other hand, had to flush and say “Not so much.”) All righty, then, the man told us, after what felt like the most perfunctory of interviews. If we wouldn’t mind coming back to the booth at 7:45, we’d find out if we’d been selected from the forty or so people to go onstage and show off our leet spellage skillz. Well, forty or so people, I thought to myself. My chances seemed about the same as winning the lottery—thank god. Surely there were thirty-nine people more interesting on the stage than I would be.
At 7:45, while the Mont was in the men’s room, I assembled at the back of the eager group gathering in front of the little booth, hoping that I could hear four strange names pronounced and then go on my merry little way to the stratospheric balcony seats I’d purchased for us. However, the evil bastard who’d been running the booth had other plans. “And our first audience spelling contestant is. . . .” he said, hushing the crowd. Then he called my name.
I said a word aloud. You know. A four-letter word. And then, glowering, I raised my hand so he could find me in the crowd. (I’d briefly entertained the notion of pretending not to hear, but then I’d remembered he had my seat number.)
The next few minutes were fairly confusing. I and the other three ‘volunteers’ from the audience were hustled into a small room in the theater’s offices, where we were told we’d been chosen for our personalities (or, as I suspect in my case, my lack thereof), and that we were going to be having fun, fun, fun as part of the show. I tried to anticipate the fun, fun, fun, by keeping a pleasant smile on my lips while I listened to him tell us that we now had new seating assignments in the house and that when our names were called, five minutes into the show, we’d be making our way down the aisle, up the stairs, across the bridge to the stage. Then we’d stand there until the cast members took us to our seats on the bleachers. The one thing we had to remember, said the evil bastard, was that when we were called to the microphone for our turn in the bee, we had to ask for our assigned word’s definition, and then ask to hear it used in a sentence. Meanwhile, as he talked, two assistants from the show sat on a table behind him, studying us and scribbling furiously on little sheets of paper. It didn’t take a mental giant to figure out that they were up to something.
Finally, after repeating our instructions three times, we were allowed to follow specially-assigned ushers to our new seats. I was pleased to find that ours had been upgraded from the back of the second balcony (hey, they were only twenty-five bucks) to the aisle of the fourth row. If I was going to be publicly humiliated—and I was dead certain that was my immediate fate—at least I’d be returning to a seat that cost four times as much as the ones I’d purchased. “I hate you,” I growled at the Mont as I sat down and the lights dimmed. He merely giggled a lot. He kept it up as I emptied my pockets of my cell phone and keys and shoved them at him, too.
I barely remember the show’s first five minutes, to be honest. I was dimly aware that there was some kind of opening number. Then the woman playing Rona Lisa Peretti, the bee’s moderator, after some general opening statements, followed up by saying in a bright voice that there were some boys and girls missing from the competition. Then she called my name, and while the audience applauded, I dutifully trotted up on stage and took my place behind the desk. We volunteers were quite the cross-section, demographically. Next to me stood an older woman in a leopard-print outfit; next to her was a teen girl, and the last audience contestant was a much older man. After we’d had enormous placards with our official entry number hung around our necks, the cast members grabbed our hands and wrestled us to our seats on the bleachers.
I’d been dreading having to participate, but you know, it’s not as if I haven’t been on stage before. And I’m not really ever frightened at having to speak before large audiences. However, I can’t say that I was all that wild when the first few words the cast members had to spell, sprinkled between the songs, were things likeelanguescence and boanthropy. (Actually, those I probably would've gotten.) When the first of the first of the so-called volunteers finally took the microphone and she was given the word jihad, I thought there might be hope for a simple word of my own. I knew how to spell that one.
But no, it was not to be. When the leopard-print woman had taken the stage, by the way, and the moderator had introduced her with the words, “So-and-so, on her way to the spelling bee this evening, killed a wild animal by the side of the road and took its pelt as a trophy,” I was pretty sure I’d figured out what the two staffers who’d been scribbling down notes earlier had been up to. And hoo, boy, I surely couldn’t wait until it was my turn to be roasted, let me tell you. Finally the big moment came, just as I knew it would. The moderator called my name. As I sprang up from my bleacher and walked toward the microphone and the big, wide house beyond it, I heard the moderator remarking about my shirt in a cheerful, church-lady kind of voice, “Vance finds vertical stripes very slimming!” I decided that to take it as a compliment was the only way to go, with that one.
Then came my word. The moment I heard it, I realized I didn’t have a beggar’s chance in hell of spelling it correctly. What was more, I was pretty sure I wasn’t intended to. Actually, if I was certain of anything, it was of the fact that the word that the guy playing the Vice Principal had just given me was the name of a Pokemon, if anything. “Could I have a definition, please?” I asked dutifully, trying to be a good sport about it. I was informed that my word was a Chinese lottery or sweepstakes. “Could you use it in a sentence, please?” I said, but honestly, I didn’t even hear the comedic sentence because I was too busy trying to figure out in what way I could spell the damned thing without looking too much like a complete ass. Once the laughter died down, I gave it a whirl. “Pokkopoo,” I repeated. “P-O-K-K-O-P-O-O.”
The bell dinged to indicate I’d been incorrect. (I should’ve known it was pok kop piu, apparently. But you know, to my credit, I was mostly right.) The cast sang their farewell song to me, and the guy playing the kid’s comfort counselor gave me a big hug, handed me a consolation juice box, and sent me, the first person eliminated from the 25th Annual Putnam Spelling Bee, back to my seat. Thank god. “I hate you,” I growled to the Mont when my ass hit the cushion. He only continued to giggle.
The next two audience volunteers had to spell the words Mexicans and cow. Darn it! I could’ve handled those!
Afterward, some of the people around us told me I’d done well, and asked questions on whether or not we’d been coached on the words, or whether I’d been nervous. No, and not really, once I’d gone up there, I told them. It had been fun, fun, fun. “Plus,” I said, holding up my non-biodegradable container of apple concentrate, “I got a juice box!”
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