Bakla’s 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee Experience
Sometime around March of this year, I chanced upon my friend Gibbs Cadiz’s blog entry about a musical called The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. I really wanted to watch the show but my busy schedule made me miss it. Then I forgot about it.
I only remembered it about two or three weeks ago when the Scripps National Spelling Bee Finals aired on ESPN. I’m not really an adept speller but when I was younger, I’ve always wanted to participate in one. I can recall my younger self browsing through dictionaries and encyclopedias searching for difficult words to memorize and familiarize myself with. One of them was triskaidekaphobia – the fear of the number 13. I now forget the language of origin and alternative pronunciations. Oh, those were my good old days.
The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee is a one act musical comedy with music and lyrics by William Finn and a book by Rachel Sheinkin. The show centers around a fictional spelling bee set in a geographically ambiguous Putnam Valley Middle School (however, Putnam County, NY does have a village called Putnam Valley). Six quirky adolescents compete in the Bee, run by three equally-quirky grown-ups.
-via Wikipedia
After watching the Scripps National Finals, I felt bad because I missed The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. An hour or so later, I shook it off and went on with my life.
Until last week when I received a text message from
