Newsflash: Not all NASCAR fans are illiterate rednecks

Last night I competed in the Nashville Adult Literacy Corporate Spelling Bee as one of three on a team representing my employer. (This would probably be a good time to mention that my views expressed in this post—hell, this entire blog—do not necessarily represent the views of my employer. Please don’t hold anything I say against them. They rule.)

We won last year, and we were hoping to bring home the first place trophy again this year. Unfortunately that wasn’t in the cards, but that’s not why I am upset.

The bee masters were local author Ann Patchett and her husband, Karl Vandevender. At the beginning of the bee, Patchett said she has had “hecklers” in the past because she frequently mispronounces words, and so she brought her husband along to help her. He seemed nice enough, but his thick southern accent and tendency to mumble really just made it worse.

But it wasn’t Patchett’s trouble with pronouncing a few words nor her tendency to kind of make up the rules as she went along in the bee (this affected two other teams, not ours) that pissed me off. No, it was her elitist attitude. She acted like she was better than all of us, and like she was above the spelling bee.

After reading some of the words, she would make a quip like, “Yeah, right, like any NASCAR fan has ever used THAT in a sentence.” Actually, she did this several times. At one point she went on a tirade about how NASCAR drivers aren’t “real athletes,” and seemed really burdened by the sample sentence that pointed out certain athletic traits a NASCAR driver needs. She made several comments about how she wanted to go through the words as quickly as possible because she “had better things to do than be at a spelling bee.”

By the end of the event, it was clear that Ann Patchett thinks:

• All NASCAR fans and drivers are morons


• The competing teams were idiots (she was condescending to every single team she addressed)


• We all wanted to hear her and her husband bicker

If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s when people act like they’re better than me. Or anyone else. And that’s ALL SHE DID. The entire night. I felt like she thought we should all be embarrassed for even showing up.

Y’all, I am from a big city (Chicago) just like Patchett is (Los Angeles). And while I moved here when I was 18 by my own choice and Patchett when she was five (a choice I’m guessing was not so much her own), let’s go ahead and say we’re both not native southerners. But for Christ’s sake, in her 39-odd years living in this area, has she never met any NASCAR fan that has more than two teeth and indoor plumbing?

I am not a NASCAR fan, but that’s not because I think I am better than the sport, I’m just not that into sports in general. However, Ian and I have friends who are fans. His mom and her boyfriend are fans. Hell, Summer and Cole had to help me get my NASCAR lingo down before the bee.

And guess what? They are all educated individuals! They can do stuff like form complex sentences, understand abstract concepts, use indoor plumbing and carry on conversations with more than just grunts and nods.

I bet that if Ann Patchett were to read this, she would probably tell me I’m being too sensitive and she was just joking and haha, she was just trying to get laughs at a charity spelling bee so LIGHTEN UP ALREADY DAMN YOU.

But you know, Ann, this is the south. And I don’t care if you were born in L.A., you’ve lived here long enough to know that you were being, as we say so politely in the south, ugly.

But just in case you need to hear it in the language of us non-southerners: You acted like a pretentious, patronizing, arrogant bitch.

Do you need me to spell that for you?

~ by Megan on September 10, 2008.