Author Archives: Amanda Suarez

Inappropriate Chanting in Theatre

Informant: In theatre you normally have an opening night to get everyone to, like, get excited and pumped.

Collector: How does that work?

Informant: So normally everyone just gets in a circle and we talk about the experience. Like, what we’re excited about, and what we really wanna show these people tonight. In my old theatre group, in high school, we did this chant. It was ridiculously inappropriate! But it was great because it got everyone pumped up.

Collector: What was the chant?!

Informant: Um..it’s a little inappropriate.

Collector: It’s okay!

Informant: “Fuck that nigga shit, fuck that nigga shit.”

Collector: Oh! Why??

Informant: I don’t know how it got started, but to like build that up it was like “Energy, energy all around. You can bring a nigga up you can bring a nigga down!”  And as soon as that got built up, everyone would go, “Ah! Fuck, that nigga shit. Fuck that nigga shit.” But it was great because it was a sound-proof room, so we would do that before almost every show.

Collector’s Notes: I hear about a lot of circles in ceremonies, and I think it carries a lot of significance.  We talked about circles symbolizing cycles and the seamless movement from beginning to end back to beginning.  A show, in a way, is like a cycle, and the opening night is the beginning of the end.  This is especially true in a high school or college theatre group that puts a couple shows on every year.  They cycle through the different stages of the show.  The opening night is the liminal point where they go from practice to performance.  I’ve also heard about a lot of cases of group chanting for ceremonies.  There is a unity I think that comes from saying things in large groups of people.  Also, when something is chanted and repeated a lot, it lends itself to being learned by others.  That way, people can easily enter into the community.  This particular chant was a few choice words to say the least.  That may have had something to do with the fact they were in high school, and that sort of  language was taboo.  However, the tension and adrenaline they got from using that kind of “forbidden” language at a school function probably gave them a lot of energy to put toward performance.

 

 

Chicken in the Frats

Collector: Have you heard any stories about people doing weird or crazy things for initiation on The Row?

Informant: Mostly from the fraternities. Not as much from sororities. Well I’ve heard—Well, this is ridiculous!—- So I heard that they draw a house in their basement on the floor, and that’s where the pledges have to “live” for like a week. And they all have to sleep “in the house” but they just, like, lay on the ground together.

Collector: Oh my God! What?

Informant: Yeah then they’ll like turn off all the lights and put live chickens down there and throw eggs at them while they’re sleeping. And I don’t understand, but that’s somehow part of the initiation.

Collector: Why the chickens and the eggs?

Informant: I don’t really know! I don’t know if it means anything significant, or if it’s just to make them generally uncomfortable.

Collector: I heard someone talking in one of my classes about how they, like, blare music 24/7 in the frat houses during initiation?

Informant: Yeah! Or in one fraternity, they’re supposed to memorize all of the words of Super Troopers, the movie. So they have to watch it—like a pledge is always supposed to be watching it, at least one has to be watching it twenty-four hours a day.

Collector: Oh wow.

Informant: They can like rotate and take naps.

Collector: Do you know why Super Troopers?

Informant: I have no idea! That’s kind of the weird thing about fraternities. They’re not traditions that are really rooted in anything, like, significant. But it’s more about bringing people together. Like in going through weird processes you really get to know and bond with people.

Collector’s Notes: This is one of the many, many stories I’ve gotten from people involved in Greek life, but this is the only one about fraternities that I’ve collected.  It seems like their initiation traditions are a little more physically intense than the sororities.  This could be because they’re supposed to be proving how “manly” they are.  They seem to test physical limits a lot with drinking games and workout challenges (other stories I’ve heard).  I’ve also noticed that they very much like symbolism and the complete lack of symbolism.  Making the pledges “play house” in the basement is like a mini version of the fraternity house and life within that.  They make them stay up all the time and test their concentration and dexterity with memorization and music.  I learned in high school that memorization is the easiest form of learning.  I think that makes an interesting point here.  Their testing their learning ability, but at a really basic level, which may mean that its more for bonding, like the Informant said.  Practicing and staying up puts people in extreme situations, where they’re more likely to get close to others and create meaningful friendships.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Senior Pranks in The Cave

Collector: Did your high school have any senior traditions?

Informant: Um, we had a tradition where the seniors go to this place called The Cave at the very end of the year. It’s not a real cave, it’s just like this weird room that you have to enter through the janitor’s closet. It’s just like dirt ground and almost halfway under the school building. They just store a bunch of old desks and weird stuff in there. It’s [the tradition] basically allowed by the teachers. Like, they purposely unlock it so that they can go in there. But then you graffiti on, like, the poles in there, but it’s condoned by the school. It’s a legit thing!

Collector: That’s so cool! So, it like collects over time?

Informant: Yeah, it looks neat and colorful. There’s like really old signatures on there and like people started using spray paint. Then my year we decided to use puffy paint. You know, cuz it’ll stay raised up even if people spray paint over it. I think that’s kind of cool.

Collector’s Notes: Senior traditions and pranks are a huge coming-of-age tradition pretty much anywhere you go, I’ve learned as I’ve asked more and more students about them.  The fact that the teachers sanctioned it in this case is particularly interesting to me.  I know at my own high school, teachers hated our senior traditions and we were usually warned against doing anything that was too drastic.  Graffiti has been a cultural art since the 1970s, but its origins go much further back, as far as ancient Egypt with hieroglyphics ( DeNotto).  This has given it infinite variety over the different countries and peoples it’s been a part of.  Graffiti has, for many decades, been a representation of the underlying feelings of the common people.  In the case of this school, it was maybe their way of leaving their mark, and a little piece of them, in the representation of their childhood that they were leaving behind.  This way, the were expressing themselves in two different ways. They literally “marked” the liminal point in their educations and personal lives.

REFERENCES: DeNotto, Michael. “Street Art and Graffiti.” College and Research Library News. American Library Association, 2014. Web. 14 Apr. 2015.

Pooping Nun Ghost

Informant: There’s a haunted bathroom stall…

Collector: Oh! Tell me about that!

Informant: So we have the toilets that automatically flush when you walk out of the stall, except this one stall flushes nonstop.

Collector: What?!

 Informant: They always bring in maintenance people to try and find something to fix it, and they can’t find a problem with it. They’ve replaced the monitor, they’ve replaced everything on it and it keeps doing it.

Collector: That’s so weird.

Informant: So, they’ve come up with, like, a legend that—because it’s a Catholic school— that it’s a nun who sits on the stall the whole night and just poops all night.

Collector: Oh my.

Informant: And that was one of the first things I heard about it. I got up to go to the bathroom one night and it just kept flushing and I asked someone about it and that’s what he told me.

Collector’s Notes: I’ve noticed that legends and ghost stories over the years, have been used as a way to explain things that we don’t understand.  In this case, no one could figure out what was going wrong with the toilet repeatedly flushing.  So, they created a ghost culprit.  Of course they couldn’t fix it; an unwordly being was messing with it.  What’s intersting about this particular ghost story, is that I think it’s supposed to be comforting.  For those who would be bothered or afraid of the seemingly “phantom” toilet, there was comedic relief.  The story was about a nun ghost pooping endlessly.  It’s one of the few funny ghost stories that I’ve ever heard.  These guys are in a new place, and out on their own for the first time.  They may be nervous and apprehensive about sharing living quarters with a bunch of guys they don’t know.  This story probably eased a lot of the tension, and gave neighbors something to talk about and bond over.

 

 

 

Break a Leg!

Collector: So, you’re involved in theatre and also some film stuff.

Informant: Yes.

Collector: So, are there any tabooistic or initiation things involved in that world?

Friend: Don’t say “Macbeth” in a theatre setting. We call it “The Scottish Play.” Also, you’re not supposed to say “Good luck.” You’re supposed to say, “Break a leg.”

Collector: Oh, yeah I’m familiar with those. Do we know the story behind “Break a leg?”

Informant: In earlier centuries, people would bow. There are a couple of different stories. The way you bow included kneeling one leg and bending down, so you’re literally breaking the line.

Collector: Oh! That makes sense.

Informant: Yeah, and if you had a really good performance, you would bend really far down, so that’s why you really want to, like, “break” the leg.

Friend: And you’re also breaking a line by doing that, in a way. You’re creating a line by straightening the one leg, but you’re breaking the other potential line, a little bit, because you’re bending the knee.

Informant: So it’s like “Give a performance deserving of taking a bow that low.”

Collector’s Notes: Theatre has always been an area of a lot of tradition.  People chant things before performing, they’ll wear certain pairs of tights or shoes, or they’ll ceremoniously give each other gifts on opening night.  So, it doesn’t surprise me that the “Break a leg” saying is deep-rooted in tradition as well.  Although I’ve never heard it called “The Scottish Play” I think that’s really interesting.  I’m assuming that they call it this in a “He Who Will Not Be Named” sort of way.  Because it is a play about Scotland, I’m guessing that they call it this instead of using its actual name.  We see this a lot in studying folklore, because certain things that become “bad luck” are avoided like the plague.  I like this story, though, because it sort of gives a logical explanation to the meaning of the saying.  As if someone “breaking” the line of their leg gives the saying more validation than just being a bad omen.  People naturally like to have logical or scientific explanations for things, instead of saying that something is the way it is “just because that’s how it’s been done.”  An interesting hypothesis, is that maybe people started saying “break a leg,” then because more people started saying this, “good luck,” being heard less and less, was assumed to be bad luck just out of lack of use.