Putnam County Spelling Bee: I Am a Champion!

Wednesday, 28 April 2010 | by Pat's Picks

I was a champion speller on Friday night!

My friend Dennis Garnhum is the artistic director for Theatre Calgary. The latest production there is The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, and when Dennis learned of my quick trip to Calgary and realized it coincided with opening night, he was kind enough to invite me to attend.

And then he took it a step further.  A few hours before the show, he asked if I’d be OK with being called up on stage as one of the audience spellers. “No preparation required,” he assured me. “The cast makes it easy.” (In other words, the comedy relies on us being fish out of water.)

With 15 minutes to curtain, the stage manager asked me and three others to join him for a quick briefing at the stage door.  There wasn?t much to it:  we were told to be ourselves and not try to act, listen to instructions from the cast, and actually try to spell the words when we were summoned to the microphone.

You’d think I’d have seen Spelling Bee on its Broadway run after all of the great reviews it got. But this was my first time and it was a delight.  It’s a fantastic script to begin with, but part of the joy in the Calgary production (and I presume any regional production of the play) is that the director’s given some leeway in adding local flavor. The audience loved it. Louis B. Hobson’s review in the Calgary Sun Saturday morning said readers would be “foolish” to miss this production.

I was called from my seat, along with the other audience spellers, just a few minutes into the opening act. We took our places in the bleachers and the spelling bee began. Mostly, our role was to stay out of the way of the comedy and spell a few words when necessary. We weren?t given the words or prepped in any way, but the contest is clearly engineered to at least make sure that everyone gets one right answer before being sent back to the audience. “Canadian” was the first word I faced. My answer was correct.

After that they made me dance. And spin. And jump. And then we spelled more words. I got quite a few of them right. (Including “demicastor,” which apparently has something to do with beaver pelts.) In fact, thanks to a misstep on the word ?ewe? by the second-last audience speller standing, I was the civilian champion of the night. (That earned me a classic one-on-one moment with actor Thom Allison, who serenaded me from inches away in a moment usually intended for one of the women from the audience.)

That made me a rock star at intermission! Audience members shook my hand and offered me their congratulations for being a good sport for almost an hour. Apparently my non-acting played well in the house. I met director Dean Paul Gibson and choreographer Lisa Stevens, who had flown in from New York to see her work. (She happened to be a NY1 fan, so we had a little NYC moment.)

I can?t quite decide whether the audience was laughing with me or at me, but it really doesn’t matter. I had a great time.

And the nicest surprise of the night came after the show when a man who I hadn’t seen in 24 years re-introduced himself. Dom Saliani was just as surprised himself a couple of hours earlier when I was called up to the stage.

I have trouble writing “Dom” on second reference because he was “Mr. Saliani” in my days at Henry Wise Wood High School in Calgary. Mr. Saliani was my first and only journalism teacher.

I didn?t come into the news business through the traditional route of the Journalism or Communications program. I found a side door and got some lucky breaks along the way. So I never ended up taking any formal courses in journalism beyond my time in high school. After our chance meeting, I was thinking about what we learned in Mr. Saliani?s class.

We had a lot of ground to cover in our class. We got through the basics of reporting both sides of a story and checking your facts. We studied a little about protocol and the law. We were reminded of the importance of spelling and grammar. We learned how to coax legible text out of those old dot matrix printers.

But mostly we learned how to find an interesting story and make it interesting for someone else to read. Good story selection and storytelling would make our little paper great, he assured us. For that lesson, I’m grateful.

More about the Theatre Calgary production of Spelling Bee.

The official site for the touring US production.