I Put a Spell on You

UPDATE: Jesse Sheidlower has forwarded a copy of a long-lost email I sent eons ago with a blow-by-blow, word-by-word account of the 1995 Rebar bee... click HERE.

The common elements between this recent media spelling bee and the one I organized in 1995 at Rebar are Jesse Sheidlower (whom I enlisted as judge after meeting him at Liesl Schillinger's weekly salon) and Alex Kuczynski (pre-plastic surgery) who was among the original gang of contestants.

It's arguable whether the notion of making writers grovel spell in public is original to me, but that event (arranged with the help of Oberon Sinclair, with John Alger emceeing) was a first for NYC, to my knowledge.

It was covered in the front of New York Magazine by Michael Krantz, with obligatory Andersen-era snarkiness, and in New York Press, with obligatory bile. Other contestants included Chris Weitz (pre-American Pie), Jenny Lyn Bader, Schillinger and Anthony Haden-Guest—who left in a huff after misspelling "chihuahua.

The winner was Jim Holt, then a writer for The Wall Street Journal, who bested Matt Heimer, then of Facts on File, who some speculate threw the contest after it became clear that neither he nor Holt was likely to misspell anything, and we could be there all night. I think the word was "dirndl"; it was all captured in an issue of my long-defunct 'zine, Ersatz ("the magazine of cheap imitation"), but my back issues are busy growing mold in storage.

The second media bee, again with Sheidlower as judge and Alger as emcee, was held in an empty, cavernous Soho gallery space, with contestants including James Linville (then of the Plympton-era Paris Review) and Judith Shulevitz (then of Lingua Franca). It was notable for (a) John Simon going out early and leaving in a Haden-Guestian huff; (b) a drunk New York Observer reporter trying to disrupt the proceedings by yelling out spellings from the back, (c) Toby Young protesting that a bald man should be asked to spell "barrette," and (d) that the finalists, TV humorist Louis Theroux and Giuliani ghostwriter Ken Kurson, turned out to live in the same Chelsea apartment building.

Theroux wrote up his thrill of victory at this web 0.25 link.

The idea for the bee came after I won the adult contest on the summer colony of Squirrel Island, Maine, a decades-old tradition there. The main challenge of these things is to come up with a good word list. Alger added a lot to both bees by dramatizing various word games devised with Sheidlower to break up the action.

The twist of limiting participation to media people guaranteed that the event would be funny to watch, as it turns out that many publishing types can't spell very well. I was always amazed that anyone agreed to play, since every contestant except one was eventually going to look silly. Writers think they're great spellers, but spelling live is much harder than spelling on paper. And audiences get to feel superior to those brainy writers, thinking "I could have spelled that."

And invariably, there is plenty of suspense, and funny situations arise without even planning them, e.g. Young and the barrette. Nothing could convince Toby that assigning him that word was an accident, but it was.