Flashback 1993: "Shiver like rhesus monkeys"

        The 95th Scripps National Spelling Bee ends today in Maryland, and as usual, I cast a wistful smile back to a time, exactly 30 years ago, when I spent a year reporting on the bee, tagging along after Sruti Nadimpalli, 12, on her quest to win the 1993 bee  for my book, "Complete and Utter Failure." It was a creative piece of reporting, back then. Spelling Bees were not literary cliches, back then, Not seen as worthy of more than passing contemplation — and I can take a bit of credit for the bee-as-literature subgenre that later formed, as Myla Goldberg, in her novel "Bee Season," credits that chapter with getting the gears turning.  
     The bee often veered into tedium, and I used a technique I called "Showing the wires" — you see me, trying to report the story. This is from a chapter called, "Shiver Like Rhesus Monkeys" and this scene, at the National Bee finals in Washington, D.C., excerpt explains why:

      In the press room, I find three Scripps-Howard staffers — college kids, in spelling bee T-shirts. They are hanging out, having fun; and introducing myself, I join them. "You have to meet Mr. Bee," says Ellen Morrison, a DePauw University senior, taking me up to a 3-foot-high wood-and-wire bee figure. Mr. Bee has a pleasing, 1950s, Reddy Kilowatt feel, and I suggest they would sell more bee T-shirts if they put his picture on them rather than the present drab sextet of stylized words (a multicolored "spectrum," "staccato" written over musical bars, a striped "zebroid" and so on).
     We have a wide-ranging conversation about the bee. The volunteers are surprisingly loose with negative information. Joel Pipkin, a recent graduate from Midwestern State University, suggests that the bee is a good way for junior high school kids to pick each other up — he has seen contestants holding hands. Just joking, of course, he quickly adds. Ha-ha-ha. they tell me about nervous kids falling off the stage, and about the Comfort Room, a chamber off the ballroom where the failed contestants are immediately led to compose themselves after missing their words.
     "You won't be allowed in, because the kids will be upset," says Shannon Harris, another DePauw student.
     "And because you're a journalist," adds Ellen Morrison, who seems to have a thing against journalists, so much so that I ask why. She explains that a few days earlier the Washington Post ran a scathing article about the bee, and so everybody on the bee staff is skittish around reporters. I thank her for this information.
     They are so forthcoming with damning details about the bee that I find myself laboriously explaining the journalistic process to them. I say something like, "You understand that I'm a writer. I'm talking to you because I'm writing a book, which will be published and the general public will then read." Normally this speech is reserved for people I suspect of having limited mental capacity, given in the hope of helping them to comprehend what is going on and reducing the chances of their being surprised to see their words in print later on.
     The next morning, I get to the bee a half hour early, thinking I must sit with the parents since I haven't been accredited as a reporter. The first person I run into is Ellen Morrison, barely recognizable in her peach publicist's suit and done-up hair. She flaps over to me, a flurry of concern, worried that I will quote her candid comments of the day before "out of context."
     The concept of being quoted out of context was invented, I believe, by people who blurt out ill-advised statements and then regret them later. True out-of-context distortion — someone saying, "It's not as if I'm a thing of evil," and being quoted as bragging "I'm a thing of evil" — is rare to the point of being unknown.
     On the other hand, highlighting controversial statements over the more mundane is the basis of reporting. That's what news is. If I interview a kindly old kindergarten teacher who spends forty-five minutes telling me how much she loves the kids, and bakes them cookies shaped in the letters of their names, and then suddenly adds, "Of course, what I'd really like to do is to strip the little buggers naked and torture them to death with a potato peeler," her previous sentiments suddenly diminish in value. Perhaps, from her perspective, it is unfair to seize on a single sentence and obsess over it, ignoring for the most part her loftier expressions. But from the perspective of everybody else, I don't have much choice.
     I try to reassure Morrison that, Janet Malcolm notwithstanding, most journalists are not out to pointlessly skewer innocent subjects. We don't have to. The beauty part of the profession is that the guilty almost always find a way to impale themselves, with little or no assistance necessary.
     As if to prove my point, Morrison takes me in into the Comfort Room, which I have asked to see beforehand, since as a journalist I will not be allowed to enter once the bee begins.
    She gives me a quick tour of the narrow, elegant little room. Her narration, in the best and most in-context transcription I can make off my tape, is as follows, beginning with her pointing out a few objects in the room:

    "Mr. Bee. Food. Dictionary. Parents are allowed back here. No journalists are allowed back here. We'll have some upset kids back here. Usually we have a curtain across the middle so the ones that are crying usually go hide behind it in the corner and shiver like rhesus monkeys, you know: wooo, ooo, ooo."

     I'll never forget standing there, holding my little miniature tape recorder, as Morrison said that, thinking, "You people are insane..."