Monthly Archives: May 2014

Initiation into A Cappella

The informant is a member of an on-campus a cappella group called Reverse Osmosis. In the fall semester, new members are initiated in the Christmas season before the Christmas concert. Without the new member knowing, a “mother” and “father” are selected to parent the chosen member. At a rehearsal preceding the concert, the parents reveal whom they’ve selected as their child through a fabricated story; the new member, however, is unaware that the ritual is taking place or that there is even a tradition of “parenthood” in the group. In the informant’s experience, one girl, who was then dating another member of the group began by saying, “[So-and-so] and I are breaking up because I got drunk and had sex with [a different member of the group.] I got pregnant. But the good news is I finally gave birth to the baby and his name is [the informant].” She and the other selected parent then proceeded by revealing a gift basket that they put together, filled with bibs, bottles, diapers, and alcohol, which they then proceeded to consume.

Analysis:

Many groups in college seem to include a conceit of family, most likely because a nuclear family is the most intimate unit of community in our culture. Therefore in order to follow the tradition of creating a home away from home, this group, along with the many others, has woven the custom into their identity. What’s interesting about this particular ritual is that it takes place as a kind of initiation but only after the new member has spent nearly an entire semester in the group. The informant explained that the timing of the event isn’t related to the potential to kick out new members so much as it is to solidify and strengthen the friendships forged naturally between the old members with the new over the course of the semester. What’s also interesting about the informant’s particular experience was that the fabricated story was marked by one member’s infidelity to another and resulted in a separate union brought together by the informant. Though the infidelity (which, to clarify, was falsified) may be unique to that particular story, in another example, the informant explained, “I might say, ‘Me and Jen were hanging out. And we got really drunk and had sex…'” In both examples, the stories illustrate accidental impregnations resulting from drunken escapades. Of course, these are only two examples of a plethora of initiations (the group was founded in 2001).

In short, the main purpose of this tradition is to help transition new members out of the liminal space of their membership. In order to do so, the group has appealed to a kind of parody of the societally based convention of marriage. More digging is recommended to understand if the main intent of the story is to completely deceive the new member until the reveal or to simply entertain.

“Tuck-ins” at UCSD

The “ceremony”:

When a member of a fraternity or a sorority wants to pick up a “little sibling” of the opposite gender, the little is called a “tuck in.” In order to legitimize the act, the *families of both the member and the prospective “tuck-in” come together on a designated night to properly “tuck him/her in.” The older members select a story-book (the informant used Green, Eggs, and Ham as her example) and a word that is both unique and recurring in the text (i.e. “green” or “ham”). The older sibling would then begin reading the selected story, and every time the selected word within the story comes  up, the prospective tuck-in must take a shot of a predesignated hard alcohol. As the night goes on and the tuck-in gets more and more inebriated, he or she must also play games in demonstrating his or her lack of sobriety. For example, she might be asked to give a nick name to every other member present at the event, and then remember all the nicknames; for each mistake, he or she must take another shot. The objective of the ritual, of course, is to legitimize the union of the siblings through severe drunkenness.

*Each new member of a sorority of a fraternity is assigned to a “heritage” of preceding members. While there are no “parents” there are brothers and sisters, which carry down the line as grand-big-sisters/brothers (shortened to “grandbigs”).

Analysis:

The informant, herself, being a member of Theta at UCSD had gotten tucked in when she was a sophomore, when she was 20 years old.

Collector: Why do you think you guys do it?

Informant: Well…I think it’s just welcome new members into another community, I mean it’s college so yeah…the drinking.

Collector: Why are they called tuck-ins?

Informant: I have no idea. Maybe it has to do with tucking the members in to the group, but I don’t know why anyone would pick the words “tucking in” to describe something that could just as easily be called…like integrating or something. (chuckles)

While the notion of families in the Greek community is not unique to UCSD, what I do find interesting is precisely what the informant was touching on in her last comment. It does seem curious that such a specific phrase would be used, and frankly the first image that comes to mind, particularly because of the play on the family dynamic, relates to the phallus. Perhaps “to tuck in” first surfaced as an innuendo to describe the consummation of a new union. Regardless similar traditions exist in Greek communities at other schools. Here at USC, for example, the process of taking a little sibling of the opposite gender also exists, though they’re simply referred to as “little bros/sisters (according to gender, of course).”

Something else in the process worth noting would be the story-book – again, an example of a play on home life. The prospective older sibling reads the story, analogous to how a parent reads a bed time story as he or she “tucks in” the child. However, this particular ritual only takes place in the event that the older and younger siblings are of opposite genders, so I maintain the hypothesis that the phrase “tuck-in” may very well extend beyond the innocent connotations associations of a parent tucking in a child. After all, this is college. This is NOT, however, to say that any kind of sexual violence takes place; rather it is simply speculation of the phrase etymology.

 

“Off the Bricks”

The informant learned the phrase “off the bricks” during her time as an intern at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival Summer Seminar. A brick pathway led to the theater at which the performances took place, so the interns were taught to keep any talk regarding the performances “off the brick [path]” and away from the theater to prevent influencing any potential audience members’ perspectives before watching the show.

As far as the informant knew, no official punishments were administered for failing to adhere to the motto. Rather the phrase served more as a reminder to members, both old and new. Something to keep in mind, as with all mottos and proverbs, are the implications that follow from these phrases. Advice crafted to ensure that audience perspectives are not altered indicate that audiences may have been impacted by comments they overheard from employees. Teasing this out a bit further, the measures taken to prevent such occurrences illuminate that audience perspective purity is of a high value in the theatrical community. Rather than allowing those involved in the process of creating a piece dictate, whether intentionally or not, the community aims to preserve the audience’s first encounter with the production as purely their own and unique to each person.

“Bad and Worse News for the President”

The Joke:

Picture this. We’re in front of the White House. It’s morning, and the first snow of winter came last night. President Obama wakes up to a phone call from the CIA. “Mr. President, ” the agent says, “we have bad news and even worse news.”
“What?” the president cries. “Okay. What’s the bad news?”
“Look outside your window, Mr. President.” Outside his window, President Obama finds a message written in urine in the snow. The message says something like, ‘Fuck you, Obama.’ “Mr. President we did a urine check and found that it belongs to Vice President Joe Biden, sir.”
“How can that be?!” the President exclaims. “I thought Joe Biden’s my boy!…How can anything be worse than this?”
“Well, Mr. President. We did a handwriting sample and found that the handwriting belongs to Michelle Obama.”

Analysis:

“See? It’s great because the joke can apply to any administration,” the informant explained.

The informant is a 20-year-old male who learned the joke from one of his peers at a dojo he regularly attends. When i asked him why he remembered that particular one eh replied, “I don’t know. I haven’t told a formal joke in a long time. I remember reading joke books when I was in middle school. But nowadays, it’s like…those kinds of jokes aren’t popular anymore. The current events are the set up and you just deliver the punchline.”

For another reference and variation of the joke, see also:

http://www.jokebuddha.com/Democrat

“Two bears in a shower…”

The Joke:

Two bears are taking a shower. One of the bears asks the other, “Hey do you have any soap?” The other replies, “No soap…radio.”

Analysis:

“The joke is,” the informant said, “that it’s not really a joke. It doesn’t make any sense. But if you’re in a group of people and you and a few buddies are in on the joke together, one of you says the joke and everyone else just needs to laugh as if it’s the funniest thing ever. No one else is going to get it. They’re going to be really confused and then from there…it just gets funnier. It’s beautiful.”

Collector: Where did you learn it?

Informant: On a retreat I went on last year, during the drive up, two of the guys [who were older members] in my car did it to us. I had heard similar jokes before, so I picked up on it and started laughing, too. But the two other girls that were in the car had no idea and got really pissed. And even after we explained it to them, that it’s not supposed to make any sense, they didn’t find it funny at all.

 

I think this “joke,” or rather meta-joke (in which the joke aren’t the words but rather the situation of performance that becomes the joke) beautifully exemplifies the use of prank in liminal space. This retreat that the informant attended, he later explained, was a new members retreat to get the new members situated in the group. Ironically, while the intention of the retreat is to integrate additional people into community, the older members in fact alienated some of them. The informant, however, having figured out the joke earned a kind of place among the “big boys.” When asked if the joke was enacted intentionally as a bonding/alienating experience, the informant clarified that it probably wasn’t. Rather it may have just been an irresponsible prank in which the potential consequences hadn’t been fully recognized prior to enacting it on that nature of a retreat. Nevertheless, the experience illustrates a tension that lies between old members and the new: those who are in on the joke and those who are not. And if you happen to be new and yet somehow in on the joke, then you have only affirmed that you belonged in the group all along, even prior to having joined.

This type of prank emphasizes the binaries that establish identity: the “us” and “them” distinction, the “us” presumably being the originals.