Hundreds of students gathered to watch Jeremy Drake outlast 15 PVG residents during the second annual “Spell or Die” competition in the dorm lobby on Sept. 27. Eyes clenched shut from the audience when the ultimate prize was handed to him: a pie to smash in the face of his RA.
Students had 30 seconds to spell a word pre-chosen by the word committee: Jacline Sajori and Jake Michalovich. Words were chosen from categories such as “words that might or might not start with R,” “Weird diseases” or “foreign language words.”
If contestants misspelled the word, the losing contestants had a second chance at survival by winning a game chosen by Benaya Ariel and Sarah Verhalen.
The games included “Mummy Me,” in which pairs competed to wrap their partners fully in a roll of toilet paper; “Nerf Gun Shootout,” a western-style Nerf gun shootout; and “Loop the Hoop of Boop,” a challenge to determine who could hoola-hoop the longest.
If they lost the challenge, their RA smashed a pie in their face.
Because Jeremy Drake won, he got to smash a pie in his RA, Joey Regan’s, face.
“Winning was a lot of fun,” Drake said. “The support from my hall along with the fun time was great!”
“It was very sticky, but it also tasted pretty good,” Regan said after the finale.
The night was packed with action. “I would say the best part was the lemon-eating competition,” Ariel said. “They ate a quarter of a lemon, but with the peel. The first four to eat the lemon whole were safe. The other 3 died.”
Drake said he owed his victory to previous spelling bee experience all through elementary and middle school and simple luck in the challenges, while Regan said it was Drake’s mad skills alone that swept up the competition.