Monthly Archives: April 2019

Pocono Devil

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/9/2019
Primary Language: English

1:

There was a kid in the mountains whose mom buried him alive. He came back to life as a demon, the Pocono Devil, with glowing red eyes. If you are out at night and see the Pocono Devil, you can’t break eye contact or else he’ll drag you into the woods and bury you alive. You have to maintain eye contact and back away from it.

2:

At the informant’s summer-camp was a tree known as “The Ten-Year Tree”. After attending the camp for 10 years (a combined time as both camper and counselor) you would get your name etched onto a small brass plate and have that affixed onto the tree. There was one such plate, a small rusted one, that said “The Pocono Devil”.

He was told that the house of the child who had become the Pocono Devil was about a mile away from camp so he now haunts those woods and the camp.

3:

This seems like a highly-effective tool to keep young campers from sneaking around during the night, when there may be dangerous animals lurking around. The Pocono Devil also gives the campers a piece of common lore to build a community around.

Gotcha

Nationality: Canadian
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/11/2019
Primary Language: English

1:

For over a decade at the Informant’s Vancouver Island high-school, a folk game would be organized known as “Gotcha”. It is highly similar to the widely-played game “Assassin” where all players are given a “target” which they must discreetly tag with a clothes pin. In order to sign up for Gotcha, a player must pay $20 into a communal pot. The winner at the end of the game gets to keep the money from the pot, resulting in a not-small chunk of change.

The Informant stated that the rules of the game would be updated every year, as someone new was typically organizing it. After he graduated, he said that the rules were updated to include “If you are tagged, you can strip naked in order to save yourself”. After successfully tagging your target, they are removed from the game and you inherit their target.

2:

The Informant played Gotcha as a Grade 12 and the experience was generally not unusual compared to previous years. He was, however, informed about the stripping-based rules that were added after his graduation, and was able to speak to some of the issues surrounding it. The parents and school systems, he said, had been highly concerned over the possibility of students taking pictures of the stripped-nude students and sharing the pictures on social media. The Informant also implied that students get very serious about this game, to the point that “some people don’t even leave their house for like a week”.

3:

The monetary incentive of the game is huge, especially for children who are still in high school, and the original game of Assassin is often played without any incentive besides the game’s inherent fun. Upon combining these two things, I think that the students who participate in Gotcha are willfully entering into a hyper-immersive game with the potential to turn $20 into substantially more (a feeling akin to gambling, but where the outcome has a positive correlation to your own skill and strategic proficiency). The addition of stripping as a sort of “do-over” could be taken to mean that the game designers wanted the players to have more chances to claim the pot if they were serious enough to do it, or it could also be viewed as an excuse to get classmates to willingly strip.

Annotation:

This article states that the pot for a game of Gotcha can get up to $2,000. In addition, it appears that students may also pay $20 instead of stripping nude, and can only re-enter the game twice.

https://www.nsnews.com/news/north-vancouver-students-schools-clash-over-gotcha-game-1.19654016

Choir Chant

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: March 31, 2019
Primary Language: English

Piece:

JK: “At my high school, we had a thing we would do before every choir concert. We got it from our choir teacher who went to Chapman. He said they would do it there before every show. Everyone locks pinkies and stands in a circle. You say “toy, toy toy, be brave, be daring, but above all be alive on the stage tonight.” Everyone starts hunched over whispering it and then you repeat it and repeat it until you are screaming. It was an affirmation before performance time, and really cathartic. When you’re a senior and it’s the last one that you do it’s sad.”

Context:
The informant attended a private Catholic high school in Santa Ana. This tradition was a part of her experience in choir there. She participated in it all four years of high school. The chant was done before every performance and served as a bonding experience for the choir.

Analysis:
The chant is representative of many odd chants groups do before a performance. At my high school, we had a similar chant we did before shows. I think such chants can also serve as initiation practices—a new member to the choir would likely not be taught the chant before, rather they would learn it their first time experiencing it with the group. Going from the chant being whispered to being screamed represents the energy level needed to go on stage. It is odd and you wouldn’t do it in the “real world” but the chant is a way to leave the real world and go into the more vulnerable and ‘not real’ world of the stage. By repeating the chant before every performance, it not only becomes a device to increase group comradery and energy, but a sentimental one representative of being a member of the group itself.

Long Island High School Band Customs

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Washington, District of Colombia
Performance Date: 4/21/19
Primary Language: English
Language: none

A – “There are a couple things we always did, every day we had class, once we got to class back in high school.  There’s this thing at Schreiber [our High School] where, every musician with their instrument ready would blow out some really poor-sounding tone, and then there would be a response from the other side of the room.  It didn’t really matter who responded, so sometimes there was more than one, but, you know, as long as there was a response.  And yeah, just a really poor tone coming from any instrument.  So this would happen every class, so twice a week, before our teacher/conductor got there, we were all getting ready.  This is kinda just our way of maintaining our individuality from the other students at school, I think we were all rather proud of being in the band.”

How were you Introduced to this tradition?

A – “So the first time I got into the band my sophomore year, I noticed people doing it, but no one actually said anything about it.  It took me a couple weeks before I realized that it was, like, an actual thing that we always did.  Taking part in that was kinda like a rite of passage, once you did it, you were a real member of the band.”

A – “I definitely won’t forget that we did that, I think just because it brings me back to my time in the band, where I had a lot of fun and spent time with people I liked.”

 

I was actually in the band with A, and I got there a year before he did.  So it was fun for me, who had gone through the same sort of vetting process with this one tone call and response, to watch him as he learned of it’s existence, and soon became proficient in it.  I definitely agree with his idea that this was a sort of rite-of-passage situation; I’d also add that it was almost a weird way of hazing new members, getting them to think that we sound awful, getting them to wonder why they’re even there if that’s the case.  Then we start playing.

Three Wise Men

Occupation: Student
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Context:

The informant recounts the different religious and cultural stories that he heard while growing up as a child.

In the transcript of our conversation, he is identified as S (storyteller) and I am identified as C (collector).

 

S: Do you have the thing of the three wise men? It’s a Catholic thing.

 

C: No… can you explain it?

 

S: Like you put your shoes out and then the three wise men from Jesus’ birth come and give you gifts

 

C: Oh.. is that it?

 

S: That’s pretty much it. Like parents put money in your shoes obviously instead of the three wise men. It usually happens around Christmas but I forget the exact date.

 

C: Oh so is this something that you or your family did?

 

S: Yeah. Well it’s a catholic thing. Popular in Spanish speaking countries.

 

 

Analysis:

Biblical stories are often told for the lessons they are able to impart on the listener, but also for entertainment. The tale of the Three Wise Men is one such story that encompasses many functions. The three men are figures of great status in society and they all see an unusual new star in the sky, and knew that it told of the birth of a special king in Israel. This marks the coming of Christ into the world and the spark of Christianity as it exists today. To welcome Jesus’ arrival, they presented him with gifts that hold symbolic meanings in Christianity. Gold was given as something that is associated with kings and the idea that Jesus was to be the King of other kings. The other two are Frankincense, a symbol used to show that people would worship Jesus and
Myrrh, a perfume that showed Christians of Jesus’ eventual suffering and death. The act of giving gifts is still something that we do til this day and it is curious to see if many base their tradition of gift giving to this tale in the Bible.

 

For another version, see: All About the Wise Men

https://www.whychristmas.com/story/wisemen.shtml

Cooper, James. “The Christmas Story – All About The Wise Men.” The History of The Christmas Story — Whychristmas?Com, www.whychristmas.com/story/wisemen.shtml.