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.

Fallen Bees, Rising Hopes

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."

Proud Parents Watch and Comfort

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.

Spellbound Journalist

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.

In the late 1980s, a family friend in the local Indian-American community made it all the way to the national stage, and since that day if there was a bee -- spelling or otherwise -- within a 50-mile radius, chances are you entered, you spelled and unless you were one of the lucky few who made it to the Washington, you shamed your parents in the local mall on a simple word within the first three rounds.

I never set foot on a national stage, of course (I was eliminated in round two), but I felt camaraderie with the contestants this week.

I didn't enter the '91 Local Bee at the Westmoreland Mall with the desire to spell down the country. I came grossly underprepared, mildly irritated, but still made it through the first round.

Sitting in that folding chair on the dais, I began to daydream the big win in a way that could not be contained by this reality.

I saw Washington, I saw ESPN, I saw the big stage, I saw the scholarship money, I saw the loving cup with my name engraved on it, I saw world peace.

But moments after I birthed that dream, the whole thing fell apart when the announcer offered, "grenade" and these letters escaped my lips: G-R-A-N-A-D-E.

My misspelling boomed across the mall's common area via microphone, and I was eliminated.

But as I considered the swarms of overexcited, overeager children in attendance, I wondered if maybe the Scripps National Spelling Bee wasn't only slightly outdated but also not meant to be part of this reality.

After all, we live in a world of second chances and pencils with erasers where there are no eliminatory dings to disqualify you when you make an incorrect decision.

As I left the 80th Annual Spelling Bee Thursday -- 16 years after the Westmoreland incident -- a participant crossed my path with her haggard, exasperated mother, begging to call a friend to let her know she had advanced to the next round.

"Your friend is at school," her mother admonished. "Besides, life hasn't stopped outside of this bee!"

It hasn't, of course. But in the bowels of the Grand Hyatt it feels like it has.

A colony of 286 spelling their way out of a labyrinth of words that will stay with them forever but that they'll likely never see or hear again.