(I didn’t hear this, but my friend did, so even though it was directed to me it was technically my friend serving as the informant:)
A guy approached me at a concert (I have dreadlocks) and said, “I hate to stereotype, but do you have a pipe?”
A lot of people stereotype someone with dreadlocked hair to be a dirty hippie stoner bum, which is not always the case, but why this guy prefaced his question with “I hate to stereotype”…
There was a man a few decades ago in the Pasadena/Attadena area of California who tried Ecstasy for the first time when he was 13, and after that his life changed for good and his life became one of sin. He went to crazy parties all the time, especially at this one man named Zaraketh’s house which was at the top of this hill on a one-way street. Zaraketh hosted parties lasting for a week or longer, his house essentially becoming a nudist colony. After Zaraketh died, he is said to have left his house to the homeless, so now if you drive up the hill at night, your car is swarmed by crazy homeless people.
“Alright so I heard this rumor that if you take a KFC Famous Bowl and you put the bowl in a blender and blend it to the point where everything is liquified and then you inject the liquid substance into your blood, then you will get really really really high.”
The informant related learning this from the internet and that’s not all that surprising. Fast food chains are frequently the subject of rumors both in regards to the shady practices of the corporations as well as the (lack of) nutritional content present in the actual food. This piece of folklore finds itself firmly in the latter camp. I’m not sure what would happen if anyone were actually to introduce a puréed bowl of KFC into their bloodstream. Death? Perhaps. But would they get high? That I find myself doubting.
“High as a kite”
The informant is a 20-year-old Theatre student at the University of Southern California. She is originally from North Carolina.
She said that it has two meanings, either someone is high on drugs or “really, really euphoric.” The informant wouldn’t use it to describe real people but rather to describe the state of someone she saw on T.V. or a theoretical person. She feels that it would be insulting to use it to describe a real person. She thinks she learned this metaphor from her mother, though she doesn’t really remember. Her mother didn’t apply to drugs though, only to really happy people. She felt she expanded it to apply to drugs as being “high” is slang for the altered state one is in while doing drugs. She said that she thought it was kind of a unique saying as people always look at her funny when she says it.
I personally had heard this metaphor before and I thought that it was a pretty standard idiomatic expression. It interests me that her mother didn’t seem to know the drug reference inherent in the phrase and that she would use it only to refer to extremely elated people. This may reflect a certain lack of exposure to druglore in this particular family or perhaps it is a phrase more commonly used in the Western United States rather than the Eastern. As far as what the metaphor means, I think it’s a pun on “high” in that a kite goes pretty far above ground and “high” can also mean currently under the influence of illicit drugs. The use of “high as a kite” to refer to very happy people, however, is new to me. Kites certainly seem fairly happy when they’re flying around and natural “highs” certainly exist, so I can see how this phrase might be construed as such.
A National Post (Canada) article used the metaphor “High as a Kite” in an article describing a killer who was high on cocaine (Zickefoose A11), showing the use of this metaphor as the informant came to understand its meaning. Rosemary Feitelberg used the metaphor, on the other hand as the title for her article on kiteboarding – a combination of wakeboarding and windsurking, citing use of the term as described by the informant’s mother (Feitelberg 6S).
Feitelberg, Rosemary. “High as a Kite.” WWD 05 Jul 2001. 6S. Academic OneFile – Infotrac. Web. 28 Apr 2011.
Zickefoose, Sherri. ” Accused killer ‘High as a kite’ on Cocaine; Laughed in Prison Van .” National Post (Canada) 19 Nov 2008. A11. Lexis Nexis Academic. Database. 28 Apr 2011.
Tennis Shoes
Origins
My informant had a story about tennis shoes hanging from telephone wires and what they mean. When she was in junior high, she was told those shoes have a specific significance. She believes she heard it from a friends older brother who was in high school.
Quoted from Reverend Kenney:
If you walk through many different sections of LA and communities around LA, occasionally there is a pair of tennis shoes hanging from telephone line. You should be somewhat frightened when you saw them some kids would say.
I grew up in Los Angeles and was told tennis shoes were put on telephone poles to show which territory belonged to a specific street gang. If youre in a particular gang, youre supposed to read the signs / symbols of a gang and stay out, or you will be threatened.
When I came back to Los Angeles 20 years ago, the urban legend was changed a bit. Now, it signals that the house facing those tennis shoes was a crack house. If you were looking for crack, that was the place to get it. This is a story that may have some truth to it. But if you look carefully, the shoes are all different sizes. Most are not very expensive tennis shoes. In reality, what they show is that some kid was mad at another kid, took their shoes, and threw them over the telephone line. Or, it means one kid was challenging another kid to see if he had the strength to get the tennis shoes up there.
Collectors comments:
Although I was born in Chicago and never came to Los Angeles until I began at USC, I too vaguely remember seeing tennis shoes on telephone pole wires. However, I never really heard any of these legends about the significant of the shoes. I simply saw them and assumed one kid had stolen another kids shoes and tossed them over the telephone pole wires. It seems like the most logical explanation since as a child, my friends and I would always push ourselves to the limit. We would try to pop wheelies on our bikes over unstable terrain, constantly run around train tracks, and perform other actions that we used to try assert our bravery. Repeatedly throwing a pair of shoes over telephone pole wires sounds like a lot like the challenges we would make amongst ourselves.