Akeelah & The Bee

After watching the trailer for Akeelah and the Bee, I was filled with a horrible, dark cynicism. In the trailer, her classmates clap when she wins the spelling bee and act stunned when she shows she can spell "prestidigitation." Then, apparently, she goes on to show the spelling bee world, a world of "rich white kids" (even though, in all of the televised events I've seen, they've basically been vaguely Indian-looking nerdy mouth-breathing kids), that the good people of Crenshaw can spell. I was our school's spelling bee champion in the fifth grade. There was no clapping. No one was stunned that I could spell anything. I was prepared to spell "floccinaucinihilipilification," if asked, but the hardest word I was given was "committee." For a brief moment, I entertained notions of going all the way. Like the naive dork that I was (and still am, to a degree), I studied really hard, sure I'd make it to DC. My mom would have press clippings to save. My dad would have something concrete to brag to his friends about, beyond "she gets good grades." I got out on "achievement". Yeah. I've known how to spell that since I was four, but they said I put the "e" before the "i" which is such total bullshit. I slunk away, dejected, my dreams of being somebody in the spelling bee world dashed. I came back to school. No one cared where I had placed. None of the kids even asked. The event did nothing to boost my standing in our small school's social network, and I was disappointed. So, I watched the inspirational trailer with skepticism, but I couldn't help but see myself in the plucky Akeelah. But, it makes no difference, I want to tell her. There's dictionary.com and spell checker. Besides, aren't most newspapers supposedly written at a 6th grade reading level? (Back in college, I remember a girl announcing proudly that she couldn't stand the intellectual bankruptcy of the Los Angeles Times (I lived in The Valley), and she got all of her news from MSNBC.com. Yup.) Big words turn people off. My boyfriend used the word "obscure" in casual conversation at work. He was mocked. No one claps for a word nerd. No one. So those kids clapping? That has got to be some sort of twisted fantasy sequence. You could probably mesh our stories together and have the Mulholland Drive of the spelling bee world. You know, the one where she wakes up and has a different name and goes crazy from reading too many shittily-written emails from people who could care less that they spelled "cat" wrong? Damn. I guess I'm not over this.