Spelling Bee

It just didn't seem fair. One of the teams in last year's Literacy Now Spelling Bee came dressed as Miss Piggy, Fran Drescher and Sonny Bono. The spellmaster asked Miss Piggy to spell ham. Then, she had to spell pig. Oink may have been yet another word. The team's cheerleaders went wild, hooting and hollering. The other teams - including the Atco Lions (dressed in lion suits) and employees from Kramer Beverage Co. (in the ballpark beer-vending outfits) had to spell words such as antipyretic (meaning "anything that reduces fever")

Upper Merion Middle School's sixth and seventh graders were recently defeated in a spelling bee that pitted them against members of the 59ers Club, a local senior citizens' group. The spelling bee was part of an annual event in which the adults also shared stories from their past with the children. The school is part of the Upper Merion School District. ON CAMPUS Several local students have been selected to attend the Pennsylvania Governor's School program. The program offers free summer classes in art, science and other subjects on college campuses.

If you can spell C-H-A-R-M-I-N-G - and if charm is sufficient - the Philadelphia Theatre Company version of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee , which opened the company's 35th season Wednesday, will fill your bill. Staged by Marc Bruni, who has helmed many "Encores!" productions at New York's City Center, this Spelling Bee comes off as if the hugely talented William Finn, who scored it, and Rachel Sheinkin, who wrote the book, created it for charm alone. But I'm not sure that's enough.

Presence was the winning word in the fourth annual Phil-a-Job City-wide Spelling Bee yesterday and Philadelphia's official best speller is 14-year-old Jamahal Boyd of the Franklin Learning Center. After 31 rounds, three of the 38 contestants who had made it to the finals were left. Only Jamahal spelled presence correctly during the 36th round. First runner-up was Lori Hall, 14, followed by Adina Lowroy, Terrence Boone and Krishwana Norton, also 14. Jamahal won a computerized speller, a $500 savings bond, a Spelling Bee finalist T-shirt, the Phila-a-Job incentive award and a one-day trip to Washington.

Like many of the senior citizens who signed up for Saint Mary Hospital's Senior Spelling Bee last Friday, Alfred Cote said he was participating "for a lark - just to see if I still have a head on my shoulders. " He, like the rest, needn't have worried. Cote, a septuagenarian councilman from Langhorne Manor, demonstrated his spelling prowess by successfully challenging a misspelled word, xenophobia, that had been accepted as correct. Like the other contestants, Cote seemed to embody the ideal of the hospital's firstcontest as articulated by coordinator Vonna Berkey.

Drink coffee and study words five hours a day - that's the secret to April DeGideo's spelling expertise. The Ambler Catholic Elementary School eighth grader tied for third yesterday in the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee. "Crossing my fingers never worked for me," said April. But she did wear a silver necklace with an angel pendant - a lucky charm from a family friend. "I was really surprised that I did this well," April, 13, said in a telephone interview from her family's hotel room at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Washington.

Jacquelyn Volk paused for a few seconds before spelling wicket. She and nine friends, gathered around a small table filled with word lists, dictionaries and a bag of candy, were practicing for a bee. They challenged one another to spell pinniped, tremolo and dozens of other words that spice up the English language. These spelling champs don't collect Pokemon cards and can't name all the Backstreet Boys. In Volk and company's minds, puffy refers to cheeks, not a rap star. The Middletown Senior Spellers are a group of Lower Bucks adults who travel afar to compete in bees, just as spellers their grandchildren's ages do. Levittown's George Caisse, 79, founded the group five years ago. His many victories on the spelling bee circuit have cemented his role as the club's leader - the person who introduces new words for members to learn, runs the round-table drills, and keeps track of the group's victories.

Local spelling champ Matthew Malloy admitted that most of the words he learned to spell will never come up in conversation. "Some words, I don't know when I could ever use them," said 13-year-old Matthew, who beat 29 other spelling bee contenders Saturday to win the 1990 Greater Philadelphia Regional Spelling Bee, sponsored by the Daily News. The seventh-grader at St. Cecilia's School in Northeast Philadelphia learned to spell words like "argillaceous," meaning "of, relating to, or containing clay or clay minerals," and "polydactyly," the bonecrusher that eliminated second-place winner 11-year-old Judy Chao of Doylestown.

Drew Alvarez, an eighth grader from Germantown, Tenn., cannot speak, but that does not keep him from spelling. With the aid of a modified electronic dictionary developed by Burlington Township-based Franklin Electronic Publishers, Drew, 14, took off for the 71st annual Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee in Washington, which began yesterday and was scheduled to end today. He used the handheld device, which he calls "Frankie," to spell out words, as he did to win the mid-South regional spelling competition and advance to the finals.

FAIR IS FAIR Fay Vincent realigned four teams in the National League, saying it was in the best interest of baseball. To make things even fairer, he announced that he's studying the possibility of allowing the Phillies four outs an inning. NAME GAME Republican leaders had mixed reaction to the naming of Sen. Al Gore as Democratic candidate for vice president. Although his name is short and should pose no real problem if Dan Quayle was asked to spell it, it does have a tricky "e. " BAD JUDGMENT A report out of L.A. says that Daryl Gates had a secret police force that spied on celebrities like Robert Redford, Connie Chung and Tommy LaSorda.