Author Archives: Alexander Greenblatt

Tips Come in Waves

Nationality: American
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 28
Primary Language: English

“Alright so I worked in ummm…. I worked in like multiple restaurants since I was like a freshman in high school and ummm…. one thing that they’ve always had in common was ummm…. was that there was a superstition around how servers got their tips. So the superstition was that just sort of that they come in waves and like servers take it very seriously like on a day where they get like… zero dollars in tips from multiple tables and they’re not bringing home that much money, they like… it’s really easy to get down about it. but in restaurants there is this attitude that’s like incubated that like what goes around comes around… kind of… so like if they get zero dollars from multiple tables and don’t bring home that much money one day, the next shift they’re very confident that they’ll get a lot of money and because they’re confident that that system will work, they probably serve better and they probably get better tips because of that so it’s sort of like a self fulfilling prophecy so because like, when a server has a bad day for tips because they believe in that philosophy that they’ll have a better day next time they actually do which is very interesting”

What I enjoyed about this superstition is that the informant realized how the superstition worked and how it was a self fulfilling prophecy within the superstition. Aside from that it’s also this superstition within the job as Tok Thompson has said is a way for the people within the job to control something out of their control. In this case it was the servers trying to control how many tips the get.

Sideways Shoes

Nationality: Brazilian
Age: 54
Occupation: Dancer/Filmmaker/Motion Graphic Designer
Residence: New York City, NY
Performance Date: April 20
Primary Language: English
Language: Portuguese

“I have a strong belief… that whenever someone take their shoes off and they leave the shoes sideways… ummmm… their mother is gonna die… somebody told me that when I was very young and it stick to my head… I don’t know how popular that belief is… but whenever I go on a place and see someone’s shoes sideways I have to go and fix it.”

This piece is from a person from Brazil. I don’t know many people from Brazil with the same belief. Yet I feel like this belief was from her socio economic background. She was raised in an upper class, proper family that was heavy on etiquette and I believe that this belief was from her culture trying to instill this etiquette within her.

Buddha Joke

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Queens, New York
Performance Date: April 19
Primary Language: English

“So this guy is terrified of flying…uuuuum really scared of flying and ummm…. one day he’s on a plane coming from ummm…. Beijing back to the United States…. he…ummmm… asks the pilot before he gets on the plane. He’s like ‘what do I do if the plane’s crashing’ and the pilot is like ‘jump off and pray to Buddha’ and the guy is like ‘Alright fine, I’ll jump off and pray to Buddha if it…starts crashing’ so…ummmm… he is on the plane and suddenly the plane starts going haywire. it’s gonna crash and the guy is like ‘oh no, what’s gonna happen’ and he then remembers what the pilot said and he…jumps off the plane and starts praying to Buddha. he starts going ‘oh god Buddha, please save me, please save me’ and then….suddenly a huge hand comes up….out from the sky and grabs the man and he is saved. and he gets safely put down on the ground. everything is fine. and the man is like ‘aw man thank god’ and then buddha’s hand smashes the man…I didn’t tell the joke very well but…”

This joke seems to not be based on any malice towards any religion but rather be about religion in general. The point of the joke is that when we refer to God in our everyday colloquialism we are talking about the Judeo-Christian god and buddha obviously not having the credit for it is angry at the man. The joke is seems to not really reflect any culture in that sense. Also the joke is much funnier to hear in person as the teller of the joke mimes Buddha’s hand saving the innocent man and later crushing him to death.

Annapolis Tug of War

Nationality: American
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 24
Primary Language: English

“So in my ummm… hometown… ummm… my parents live in Annapolis… and in Annapolis there’s a divide between two smaller little… like… sub cities. There’s downtown Annapolis and Eastport and what’s dividing them is the chesspeak bay and theres the… there’s the bridge. an unnamed bridge that connects the two. and so ummm… each year the city of Annapolis puts on this ummm… tug of war that goes along the chesspeak bay. So they get this massive rope that’s at least a mile long and they get citizens of Annapolis to tug from Annapolis and citizens of Eastport to tug from Eastport and so… it’s usually twenty people on each side of the rope and it’s going across the entire bay and they have like boats like it’s just a rope across the entire bay for like one mile which was super cool to see every year and I participated in it on my ummm… last year and Eastport did win last year, that’s where my family lives and it’s a super cool tradition”

This tradition seems to span an two entire boroughs of a town and seems to focus on conflict between the boroughs of Annapolis. The rivalry doesn’t seem too bitter though as the towns to dedicate this one tug of way every year to this friendly rivalry.

Cootie Shot

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Queens, NY
Performance Date: April 20
Primary Language: English

“We had this ridiculous thing in elementary school… where we had cootie… well we had cooties in elementary school… but we had this ridiculous thing called a cootie shot… did you have cootie shots”

“yeah sort of”

“It wasn’t even like… it wasn’t even like distributed or anything. it was literally… it was literally…just that we would mime…. we would just mime and that would instantly cure cooties so… I mean cooties still had the same amount of seriousness as any other disease it’s just that cure was really really easy to get I mean anybody can just mime a cootie shot, there was no effort in making it or anything we just had to mime it and yet no one picked up on how plentiful this cure to what was the…ummmm… worse disease in elementary school was”

This is an interesting way that people cured the cooties in the informant’s elementary school. In my experiences with the cootie epidemic, people had to be able to fold some sort of origami to be able to cure cooties and only the people in my class talented enough to fold origami were blessed with the gift of being able to cure such a horrible disease. I wonder if this mime like policy was instituted because a teacher didn’t want to waste paper of if nobody in the school knew how to fold origami?