I had a truly exciting experience recently. To celebrate her birthday, Naomi and I went to the Fisher Theater to enjoy the touring musical, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. An added attraction of this comedy is that four members of the audience are chosen to participate in the show. On that particular evening, I was one of the lucky audience members.

I suppose I am uniquely prepared to be one of the amateurs in this show. After all, I am accustomed to being onstage, in front of people, reciting words that many of them do not understand. In all seriousness, this was quite a thrill which I will not soon forget.

To let you in on some of the details, I was on stage for about twenty minutes, sat among the real actors, participated in a dance number (don't ask me to repeat that choreography), and was twice called to the microphone to spell a word. The first word, jihad, I spelled correctly, but I misspelled my second word, apoop (which means, toward the back of the boat), which eliminated me from the competition, and consequently, from the show.

In addition to being a lot of fun, the show is educational. If nothing else, one in the audience can learn a lot of new words. There's even a Jewish connection -- one of the words is phylactery (the English definition of tefillin), which is correctly defined in the show as, small black boxes worn by Jews during weekday morning prayer services. Because it's a comedy, the example of this word in a sentence was something like: Timmy, take off that phylactery -- we're Episcopalian!

More than exotic words, the show also examines a number of important ideas underlying Spelling Bees and those children who compete in them. Issues explored include: Kids who feel constant parental pressure to win at all costs; and kids who get "picked on" because being smart isn't "cool."

In the end it is clear that there are more crucial goals in life than finishing in first place in a contest. The characters in Spelling Bee remind us that there are many paths to success, such as: learning for its own sake, trying hard for the purpose of self improvement instead of, being a friend, parenting a child by means of true physical and emotional connection. Our children should make us most proud, not by winning medals and contests, but by adopting excellent values which they have learned from the examples of their own parents.