April 26 Winners

1st place: Ben Kusmin
2nd place tie: Thomas Hemmerick, Carolyn D'Aquila, Maddy DeLeon

All three winners qualify for the season finals.

Come out to our next bee on Monday, May 10th! Everyone is welcome.

Photos taken with bobby's camera (some by bobby, some by volunteers):

April 12 Winners

1st place: Maddy DeLeon
2nd place: Carolyn D'Aquila
3rd place: Trent Williams

All three winners qualify for the season finals.

Come out to our next bee on Monday, April 26th! Everyone is welcome.

Photos taken with bobby's camera (some by bobby, some by volunteers):

So You Think You Can Spell?

The book So You Think You Can Spell? came out last October, and we here at the Williamsburg Spelling Bee were gifted a few copies which we, in turn, gifted to that season's spelling winners.

It might be difficult to imagine just how to practice your spelling from a book. For instance, the (children's) book How to Spell Like a Champ is accompanied by a CD, and I, on my Spelling Word of the Day blog, post my content as audio files, so you can spell the word for yourself before clicking to read the answer.

However, I cracked the book open to a random page and the first thing I saw was a quiz question challenging me to pluralize "auto-da-fé," and I said, goddamn, dog, you've figured something out here.

Much of the book is in the form of quizzes in which, for instance, the authors have provided a phonetic pronunciation (muh-KAK) and a definition (short-tailed Asian monkey), and your job is to write "macaque." Some quizzes provide several possible spellings, challenging you to circle the correct one. What I'm trying to say is: this book is really actually quite challenging and worthwhile, even for people who already host or attend adult spelling bees in bars.

Of course, I couldn't finish off this post without including a link to NPR's February 26th Cityscape show, in which two spellers from the Williamsburg Spelling Bee were quizzed by So You Think You Can Spell? authors David L. Grambs and Ellen S. Levine.

And finally: So You Think You Can Spell? now has its own website, where the authors wrote of the Williamsburg bee:

This is not one of those rowdy saloon bees, and there are more than a few around, that value lubrication and lubricity more than lucubration and literacy from the competing performers.

Spelling for adults is kind of a small world.

Cross-posted from JenniferDziura.com.

March 29 Winners

1st place: Wilson Southerland
2nd place: Carolyn D'Aquila
3rd place: Javier Guerrero

All three winners qualify for the season finals.

Come out to our next bee on Monday, April 12th! Everyone is welcome.

Photos taken with bobby's camera (some by bobby, some by volunteers):

The Williamsburg Spelling Bee for Private Parties

The Williamsburg Spelling Bee hosts are available for private events. Perhaps you could suggest us to your office manager before she brings in a terrible DJ or that thing with the padded sumo suits (okay, actually, that sounds awesome). Here are a couple photos by Eric Walton from an event at 50 Parties:

March 15 Winners

1st place: Jenny Brown
2nd place: Carolyn D'Aquila
3rd place Tie: Sara Luchian and Maddy DeLeon

All four winners qualify for the season finals.

Come out to our next bee on Monday, March 29th! Everyone is welcome.

Photos taken with bobby's camera (some by bobby, some by volunteers):

Paul Wing's Spelling Bee

Did you know that the first-ever televised game show -- in 1938 -- was a spelling bee?

According to UKgameshows.com, that program (or rather, programme) began with a US vs. UK match featuring Harvard and Oxford students (US won), followed by a US/UK rematch featuring actresses and various notables (UK won), followed by "Under Twenty" vs. "Over Forty" (over 40 won), followed by Women vs. Men (women won). The show was a tight 15 minutes, and was ultimately canceled when the imminent war made televised spelling seem a bit frivolous. Incidentally, the spelling bee game show led to several spinoffs, including, amazingly, Tactile Bee.

The impetus for this post is that my longtime Williamsburg Spelling Bee co-host, bobbyblue, found a copy of the board game "Paul Wing's Spelling Bee" on eBay, purchased it, and allowed me to borrow it for purposes of investigative reporting.

The game of zest and test!

(Apparently, Paul Wing was a giant in the field of film stereography, continuing his career from the 1930s through the 1990s, and also, according to IMDB, survived the Bataan Death March; it is perhaps lost to the shifting sands of time exactly how Mr. Wing ended up hosting a televised spelling bee).

What's inside!

Hmmn.

Apparently, spelling fans are called "rooters."

Every hostess will appreciate a game that doesn't require moving the furniture!

One of the harder sets of words. One list had food words, including "pumpkin."

The game was played by choosing a word caller, then going around the room and having people pull numbered disks out of a bag; the number on the disk determined the word you would spell (and some words were notably easier than others, so it was a bit of a game of chance). Correct moves got you a little green counter called a "honey," and wrong moves got you a little red counter called a "stinger" (because it's a bee, get it?)

I only had my gentleman consort around, and it's a pretty lame game with only two people. I asked him to spell "blancmange," and he insisted that I had not pronounced it like a true French person (neither, I imagine, did most people playing Paul Wing's Spelling Bee in 1938), so I gave him a re-do and he got "pumpkin." We sort of shrugged and gave up.

Zest and test! I kind of like the slogan.