It Was the Best of Bees, It Was the Worst of Bees

May 31, 2007 — -- There was a buzz in the air over at the Grand Hyatt Hotel.

It was one-part raw elements, two-parts atmosphere. The glittering ballroom, the press banks, the television cameras, the swarm of overly excited adolescents nervously shuffling in thick knots of family and newly made friends.

Their T-shirts gave away their affiliation: the 80th Annual Scripps National Spelling Bee, the final destination for 286 contestants who rose from a local field of 10 million strong, and made it to Washington, D.C., to spell down the country and take home the grand prize.

The already eliminated are a mixture of innocent envy and quiet relief, going over botched spellings and analyzing the difficulty of the words that fall from the announcer's lips.

They look wistfully as the advancing contestants onstage test their strategies: spelling into their hands before they turn to the mic, tracing letters on the backs of their name cards, asking judges for usage, origin and parts of speech as a means of buying time.

Sitting in the audience during every stage leading into Thursday's Championship Finals has taken every ounce of journalistic integrity not to pick favorites, gasp when a contestant is eliminated or cheer when one fights through a difficult word and spells out on top.

"All the kids are so upbeat," said Hillary Hoffman, director of marketing at Merriam-Webster. She's there to man the company's kiosk of words just outside the main stage. She calls the contestants "power users of the dictionary."

And if the kids are "power users," their parents come turbo-charged.

Most play their designated roles alternating as cheerleaders and comforters equally as their children battle through not just the competition but overwhelming bright lights, camera crews and the swirl of endless activity.

A few benefactors turn into savvy media strategists, juggling local newspaper interviews with television appearances as their children spell their way up the bracket.

Admittedly, this noncontact sport is a strange phenomenon, but I confess: I love a good bee.

As I blogged for Jake Tapper's Political Punch last year, growing up as the child of Indian immigrants in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, as far as the Bee was concerned, you didn't have a lot of options.