As a crowd of eager audience members filed into the auditorium to witness the Spelling Bee that, until October 19th, seemed a mere facet of Fieldston folklore, bee participants swiftly made their way to the auditorium stage, retrieved their numbers and primed their minds for the test of terms that lay ahead.
The bee took the form of an assembly: an event carved out of the day-to-day schedules of Fieldston Upper students. One of the more playful assemblies, the Spelling Bee made a comeback this year after going on hiatus when host Jefferson Randall ‘16 graduated. Randall, a comedian and writer based in New York City, commented on the irony of his position as spelling bee host. He explained that he himself had never had any particular affinity for spelling. Despite this, he sought to entertain his peers and school community with humorous definitions of the words he confronted contestants with.
Describing “taciturn” as a post-surgical state and offering up seemingly arbitrary terms like “judicious” and “terabyte” in the same round, the bee took the form of one large-scale standup demo for Randall.
With contestants sitting in alphabetical order facing a sea of students and one haunting microphone at center stage, the Scripps hopefuls formed an eclectic bunch. The bee assemblage included students whose friends had put them up to the event as a dare, aspiring linguists and logophiles and the English department’s favorite mother-daughter duo: Ms. Stabenau and Ms. Stoller. Two of five faculty participants, the duo jokingly used the event as a means of solidifying a certain “intellectual feud.” However, they ultimately decided to partake in the Spelling Bee not only to vie against each other but for the joyfulness engagements like the bee instill in the Fieldston community.
Preemptively, Stabenau stated, “I am not doing [the Spelling Bee] because I think I am an excellent speller. I don’t think that’s what it’s about in the end. I think it’s about bringing all of us together in a kind of lighthearted way that we haven’t done in a while, and I’d like to be part of that.”
Thus, she and twenty two other community members became a cause of the joy present in Fieldston’s atmosphere for hours after the assembly.
Audience members enjoyed the way the bee built camaraderie through allowing spectators to support their peers on stage. While Form IV’s Gabby Santemma affirmed this sentiment with the statement, “it was cool to see how everyone came together to cheer on their classmates,” others deemed the event “inconsistent.”
Form V student Zoe Hort, a participant in the event, first wanted to embark on the bee to delve further into her love of English and spelling. However, when she heard her first round word, stymie, she wondered if the spelling bee ever really intended to create a leveled playing field. Hort expressed, “I had a very hard word. In general, it was very inconsistent- that’s a good word for it. I feel like some people got very easy words, but I think that was the point. Some people got simple words, others did not and I got ‘stymie,’ which was not an easy word.”
Regardless of a seemingly unfair first word, Hort looks forward to her spelling bee redemption next year. In the meantime, the reigning champion, Form VI’s Amiri Moreno, shall sport his bee-themed headband and glasses: tokens of a hard-earned victory. Moreno obtained first place following a close battle with Upper School Assistant to the Deans Linda Colarusso. Nonetheless, many community members seek justice for Colarusso as it turns out she spelled her last word, protozoon, correctly.
The spelling bee and similar events generally encapsulate the spirit of Fieldston. Designed to provide exciting challenges that provoke joy and bolster community engagement, assemblies remind us that a sense of silliness remains vital among the stress of the daily school experience. As the year flies by, we cannot wait for it to be(e) spelling bee season yet again so we can return to the auditorium and watch Ms. Stabenau and Ms. Stoller battle it out for the title of queen bee.
