Author Archives: AEBH

Before There Was a National Speed Limit

Nationality: American
Age: 35
Occupation: Playwright/Market Research Survey Engineer
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/27/17
Primary Language: English

Informant: So, this one I heard from an instructor at a summer enrichment class I took right when I was learning to drive–I think you hear this a lot when you’re learning to drive. But I learned later that this is a story that a lot of people tell.

This is a story about the nineteen seventies before there was a national speed limit, because you tell the story when there used to be a national speed limit. So at the time I heard this story, the speed limit was 55. So okay, so the story was told me when the speed limit was 55 and people used to talk about the time before the 55 speed limit like it was the old West. Because in the seventies, the speed limit in a lot of places was 75 even on two lane highwasy

The way I heard this, outside the small town where this person grew up, one semi was trying to pass another semi, so it was on a two lane highway in the passing lane at 80 miles an hour, and it timed the passing wrong and hit another semi head on. Two semis both going 80 miles an hour, which is like hitting a very thick brick wall at 160 mph. They hit sooooo haaaard that the metal of the two cabs fused together. If metal smacks together hard enough, you know, in this story, it does that. So they hosed out the remains of the two drivers as best they could.

Interviewer: Hosed them out?

Informant: Yeah.

And then they left the wreckage of the cabs by the side of the road.

Interviewer: That’s it?

Informant: No. A couple weeks later, the smell of these things got so bad that they decided they had to pull the trucks apart to clean them out better, so I think they used two cranes? But they might have been pulled apart by other trucks. So they pulled the two trucks a part and then, and then they found the station wagon with the mother and her children that had been squashed so flat that nobody realized there was a vehicle between the trucks the whole time.  You also hear this one about cell phones sometimes too, the two truck drivers are texting instead of trying to pass.

 

This cautionary tale might hint at the amount of time people spend driving, and anxieties about the potential dangers of it, and the necessity of laws to govern the roads we spend so much time on; it might also, as the informant suggests, be employed to put a little fear and respect into inexperienced drivers.

The Death of Mr. T

Nationality: American
Age: 35
Occupation: Playwright/Market Research Survey Programmer
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 3/28/17
Primary Language: English

Informant: So my brother told me several times when he was in high school and college that he heard Mr. T was dead.  He’s still alive, by the way, he tweets a lot.

But my brother told me that he fell in a pool and all his gold chains weighed him down and he drowned and he died.  Told me at least four different times and I think believed it at least twice.

Analysis: it is possible that in a small, economically depressed farming town in the Midwest, a cautionary tale of sorts about a big, different-looking, fool-pitying, very tough guy drowning in the weight of his outward expressions of wealth and toughness was very appealing.  By emphasizing what they were not (loud, rich, tough, not-white) it allowed them to valorize what they were (quiet, hardworking, soft-spoken), deepening their connection to their own identity.

 

Britney Spears Story

Nationality: American
Age: 35
Occupation: Playwright and Market Research Survey Programmer
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/22/17
Primary Language: English

The impulse to attribute outrageous sexual behavior to celebrities may serve as a way to differentiate them further from the people who make them famous in a vertical model of cultural production–perhaps establishing a binary between us and them.  It is also interesting to observe which communities tell this story about which artists: that this story hadn’t been popular since Queen was hot and new in Los Angeles, but that it was being recycled every few years in a small town in Eastern Iowa seems to say something about what kinds of behavior, and by whom, are considered beyond the pale, and where those lines are drawn.

Informant: Yeah, um, I realize I’m not sure I remember this correctly. I thought I was younger when this happened, but Britney spears was not a thing until I was finishing high school. But the story I heard was that Britney Spears did a concert near Iowa City and she had to go to the hospital and have her stomach pumped.

Interviewer: I feel like I’ve heard this about Freddy Mercury.

Informant: Are you gonna let me tell this or not?  So she was unconscious and she had to go to the emergency room and they pumped her stomach and they had to pump out six ounces of semen.

Interviewer: Freddy Mercury had a quart.

Informant: In Burlington, when they tell this story, it’s six ounces.

Interviewer: Who’d you hear it from?

Informant: Some guy in high school.

So I repeated this to my brother Aaron for some reason, and so Aaaron said, when I heard that story, it was about Rod Stewart, and he was saying that his friend at the time had a can of pop in his hand, and so they were able to eyeball what six ounces looks like.  It’s a lot.  And Rod Stewart is bigger than Britney Spears.

 

Protective Superstition: String in Mouth

Nationality: American
Age: 75
Occupation: Student Advisor
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/12/17
Primary Language: English

You always hold a string in your mouth when someone is cutting or pinning something on you, and that way they won’t cut you by accident, or stick you with the pin.  I’m not sure how or why, but my grandmother was a seamstress and her mother was a seamstress, and you can bet nobody ever pinned or cut anything on me, when I was trying it on, you know, without a string in my mouth.  My mother and my grandmother, they just wouldn’t do it.  I don’t know why, it’s just how it was.

 

Informant does indeed come from a family of seamstress.  The interviewer was unable to verify other sources for this superstition, but it is clearly a sort of contagious magic: that if the person holds a string in their mouth, the wholeness of that string will somehow keep them whole.  It probably also serves a more practical purpose–reminding the person to stay still and quiet while the seamstress works on them.

The Flying Asshole

Nationality: American
Age: 77
Occupation: Retired dentist and underwater photographer
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/20/17
Primary Language: English

So I think I learned this in Cozumel, but I’ve seen it in Fiji and Palau and the Bahamas and here, too, when you’re underwater, or when you’re not underwater, but I learned this from other scuba divers, and it’s how I’ve seen it used, I’ve only seen it used underwater when someone’s, you know, landed hard on a reef and fucked it up, or kicked someone accidentally, or whatever.

But the flying asshole, it starts out as the ok sign, that circle with your forefinger and thumb, but then you wave the rest of your fingers and sort of bounce your hand across.

It’s the universal sign for, “I’m fine, but how about that flying asshole?”

Informant was an underwater photographer and for many years, and divers do have their own formal sign language, but an informal sign language has developed around the standardized one, particularly among professional divers–people who do it for money, rather than enjoy it as an expensive hobby. It seems to separate the sheep from the goats, the dabblers from the polished pros, while establishing the same sort of class division any other difference in dialect might.