As a treat for Barb after spending most of yesterday working on her proposal, we went up to Bethesda for a movie at the Landmark, lunch, and some browsing at Second Story Books.
The movie was "Spellbound": not the Hitchcock movie that I drowsed through a little while ago, but a documentary that follows eight competitors in the US national spelling bee. The children come from across the economic and social spectrum: a black girl from Washington DC whose mother is scraping by, the daughter of Mexican immigrants who don't speak English, the son of an Indian high-tech executive, and well-off children from New Jersey and Connecticut.
I was expecting the parents to be stage parents of the worst sort, pressuring their children into the competition, but they aren't; most of them are proud that their children are good enough to get into the competition and supportive of all the required training, but also not investing too much in the desire for victory. Only one parent seemed to be very driven about the competition (Neil's father, the previously mentioned Silicon Valley executive) but Barb and I were divided about him; I thought he was pushing Neil too hard, while she thought encouraging his son to strive for a goal was a good character-building strategy. (And in the end, the outcome proved Barb correct, I think). An entertaining and often heartening movie.