A “B” in Spelling

Last weekend was a fun and busy time, as most of June has seemed to be. Meredith writes down what we did each day on her calendar, and in June there was only one day out of all 30 where the day was blank (meaning we did not do anything noteworthy, on the 20th). For comparison, March had eight blanks and February, thirteen.  It has been a busy little month, and has been hard to keep up with here in the blog!

Last Saturday, we met up with Meredith’s parents and Aunt Mary and about six other former CVCA teachers for a reunion/lunch at Olive Garden. The food was good and there was a lot of reminiscing going on. The lunch did go a bit long – over two hours, and so I had to get up and walk around a couple of times since the wooden chair was not playing nice with my back.

After Olive Garden, we had one graduation party, in Kent. The party was one of Meredith’s students, Kaity, and the party was much fun. There was a ton of good food (as if we needed yet more food), and Kaity’s friends are a lot of fun. We spent quit a bit of time talking with Sarah, one of Mer’s favorite students who graduated two years ago. Kaity also had an adult-sized bouncy house, which we tried. It turns out that bouncing around in the house was a good time, but requires a lot more effort than I would have thought. Mer and I also played a very pitiful game of cornhole (a bean-bag toss game), that I eventually won, but with no great skill level. It was a great party, and I was glad Kaity was able to have such a good time. Her brother, Mark (one of my students), had been fighting leukemia for over a year, and was in the hospital at the time, and Mark ended up dying early the following Monday morning. It sounds terrible that I would be happy that Kaity would have such a great party at a time like that, but her family had gone through so much grief that I was glad they were able to celebrate something like Kaity’s graduation.

Mer and I then headed over to Porthouse Theater near our house. Porthouse is an open-air theater on the grounds of Blossom, an open air concert space where the Cleveland Orchestra plays during the summer. Porthouse was doing the musical The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Yes, it is a dorky thing to have a musical about, and it was a really good time. The show was mostly fluff, and the music was very modern (only one melody you could leave the show humming), but it was a funny show (on the whole).

The set was a school gym, which was pulled off well. The contestants were all fairly nerdy, and were the source of most of the humor of the play, although much merriment was given from the definitions and/or the “use it in a sentence” for the spelling words (“Although she insisted her casserole did not contain an indigenous South American frog, the casserole still tasted like crapaud” – pronounced “crap-o”). As an added twist, there were five people from the audience who were on stage (their friends or families had made a donation of $100 to get them on stage), and that was very funny as the MC of the evening kept on making up fun-facts about each person as they came up to spell (“She advanced to the bee from Hudson Middle School by spelling her winning word, ‘filthy rich.'”).

Each character had a back-story to add interest to the play: one student was being driven too hard, one was haunted by failure from the previous year, one got there after the two top people from his school could not go, etc.). It was probably a bit saccharine of the play to do it, but I thought it worked, and it made the play be a comedy instead of a farce.

Meredith, being Mer, kept track of how she would have done on the spelling words. She went down on some very long and technical word. I, being me, could not even remember what the spelling word was 30 seconds after it was announced, let alone spell it.

It was a beautiful evening out, so it was a fun time to see a play at Porthouse. It had been a busy Saturday, but a good one.

Sunday, we headed down to Aunt Mary’s, where we had lunch with Aunt Mary and Dale and Carlene. It was a good visit, and Carlene proudly showed us her two new books on decorating cupcakes; Carlene is a pretty incredible baker, and these books had given her some new ideas (in fact, she made cupcakes that looked like fruit pies for a party at out house later in the week).

After lunch, we headed north to a graduation party that was in a pavilion at a park. It was actually a grad party for three CVCA students, but Mer only knew one of the students and I had not had any of them in any of my clubs, so we were there to see Mer’s student, Keanna. The food spread was ridiculously huge, including an enormous spread of desserts. Mer and I ate and chatted, and kept a wary eye on a line of clouds that were bearing down on the park. It did not take long to realize a storm was coming in faster than we were eating, but we figured we would be okay because we were in the pavilion, with ten or twelve feet of roof over us on either side. We were wrong. The storm came flying in with torrential downpours and wave after wave of high winds. The rain was coming at us sideways, and was having very little difficulty in bridging the twelve feet of space under the roof. It was kind of fascinating, and everyone in the pavilion took it in stride. It was kind of like being on a water ride at an amusement park. Although we got wet, we did not get soaked because of the roof, and after about 15 minutes most of the storm had blown over. So, Mer and I were able to laugh about things with Keanna, and we headed home for a change of clothes.

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