Author Archives: AEBH

How to Live a Long Life, According to a 102 Year Old

Nationality: American
Age: 102
Occupation: Retired
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 02/28/17
Primary Language: English

Informant is 102 years old, and has become quite practiced in answering the question, “what’s your secret for living so long?”

She was recently hospitalized after an operation, and the interviewer was able to record the following instructions for living to an old age:

Well, the thing is this, it’s all about the moderation.  And being consistent.  You don’t let anything fall by the wayside.

So everyone knows you move around every day, not to little and not too much, I like to climb stairs when I can and take walks.  Everyone knows about exercise  And you eat some vegetables every day and more is better than less, everyone knows that, but the thing my mother really believed in and that she learned from her mother who learned it from her mother and that I haven’t yet gone a day without doing is every day you have a little bit of chocolate, just a piece of it or chocolate ice cream or something.

Used to be we would come home from school for lunch and there would be maybe some cabbage soup or something, kasha and mushrooms or what have you, but always there was a piece of plain chocolate cake and a big glass of milk, and you don’t go back to school until you’ve had your cake and milk.  And on the weekend it was for breakfast.  But every day it was very important to my mother because her mother taught her, every day, you have a little bit of chocolate.

My mother was hit by a car so we don’t know if the chocolate would have kept her alive so long or not, but her mother, she lived for a long time, and she did it every day.  And I’m 102 and I do it every day.   And my sister, she’s 97, and she is in very poor health, and she never ate the chocolate because she didn’t want to be heavy.  But I tell her you can’t live on bread alone and she tells me that’s not what that means and I tell her who’s to say what’s living?

Ouija Boards

Nationality: American
Age: 16
Occupation: Student
Residence: Encino, CA
Performance Date: March 6th, 2017
Primary Language: English

Informant was asked if he’d ever seen anything that was haunted, and described an experience he had while on a playdate at a friend’s house.

Informant: My friend had a oiuja board, and he, like, he got real mad, got scared, he yelled at his mom, because she put it away and it was, like, it was inside the house and facing up, and like, you’re not supposed to do that, you’re supposed to put it away facing down and outside is better, they believe, because they think that then the spirit can get out., the spirit that is in the board and answering questions. Also if they tell you their name when you contact them, you’re not supposed to say the name of the spirit.  Not even to try to pronounce it or whatever.

Interviewer: Why? What happens?

Informant: The spirit gets released, and it–it gets out of the board.

Interviewer: And then?

Informant: Depending whether it’s mad or not, it’ll maybe haunt whoever released them.  And the board also, you know, there’s nobody in it then to answer the questions anymore.

Where are they from?

His mom is from Hungary, and she was glad when he pointed out that she put it away wrong because she believes it too.

License Plate Game

Nationality: American
Age: 16
Occupation: student
Residence: Encino, CA
Performance Date: 3/31/07
Primary Language: English

Interviewer: Long drive.  Do you know any games you can play in a car?

Informant: Just a game that you play but it’s not a real game.  I used to play it on the way to, like, football games and stuff.  But now I usually have my phone.  Anyway it’s not real, it’s not a real game.

Interviewer: Sure it’s real.

Informant: You want me to tell you about it? It’s stupid. I still do it sometimes. I don’t really do it anymore.

Okay, so if you see a license plate from another state, you get to punch someone in the car once, and if it’s from another country, you get to punch him three times, and rare cars count too—like you can do punch buggy so you punch someone if you see a VW bug as well. And the new ones count too. Not just the old kind. I don’t really play that anymore, though.  Unless I’m with little kids.  And then sometimes I let them punch me because it doesn’t hurt.

Informant is sixteen and lives in a suburb; admits that many of his waking hours are spent in a car.  His unwillingness to admit to playing the game might indicate that he is transitioning out of the group it’s aimed at, which, in his estimation, is young children.   The reluctance to even discuss the game, based on the idea that games are for kids younger than he is, may indicate him wanting to be identified with an older group; he might also see himself as too advanced to need geography lessons from his parents while in the car, and too sophisticated to be excited by the novelty of seeing a license plate from another place, or an unusual car.

The UCLA Cheer

Nationality: American
Age: 77
Occupation: retired dentist and underwater photographer
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/25/17
Primary Language: English

Informant found this carved into a desk in the medical library at UCLA in 1967, and shared it with his fellow students.  They would often chant it together during difficult exercises, like dissection.  Informant recognizes that it was a way of cementing in-group identity, establishing solidarity and masculinity (particularly through some of the more homophobic and misogynistic wording), and when dissecting corpses, pushing away thoughts of mortality with something coarse and crass.  Also, since most of his fellow students were young men living at home, informant suspects that such liberal use of profanity helped him and his fellow students to feel more adult.

Informant, now 77 and retired, still uses this cheer when doing something difficult or complicated, or when looking for his glasses.

Informant:

So you use this however you want.  I used it a lot in the dissection lab, you know, because the corpses didn’t bitch about it.  I did it in a whatchacallit, female monks, in a convent, when I was putting together a wedding cake for my dental assistant.  The nuns were furious.  You ready?

Interviewer: Ready.

Informant:

Okay.

Ahem.  It doesn’t work if you’re quiet about it, though.

Cocksucker, motherfucker, eat a bag of shit!

Douchebag dicklicker bite yer mother’s tit!

We’re the very best and all the others suck.

UCLA, UCLA, rah rah fuck!

 

Prejudiced beliefs about Jewish People

Nationality: Caucasian
Age: 61
Occupation: Private Chef
Residence: Santa Monica
Performance Date: 4/16/17
Primary Language: English

Informant related this while at tea, when interviewer mentioned a Jewish holiday in passing.

First of all, I don’t believe any of this, but these are things my grandparents said to my mother and she said to me.

I did tell you before, didn’t I? How my grandfather used to take my grandmother to the opera, and he had a box because he was a successful early ad magnate or tycoon or what have you, and he would pick out the Jew in the audience by their pointed ears. I never asked for an explination because you know, you don’t need one with something that batty.

My mother grew up in Indiana and they had a cook and a maid and one day, you know, Mom and I were driving up at 19th and California, there’s a little tiny temple school, and my mother says in ths really sweet voice she used sometimes, “when I was growing up, my I was told by the maid that Jews took Christian babies and ate them and drank their blood.”

I think it must have been the German help because my mother never saw her parents and they tended to try to at least keep their prejudices, you know, tasteful. At no point did I ever press my mom for more details about this because, you know I was stunned.  Schtunned.

Informant’s grandparents are of English and German extraction, and their beliefs do reflect historical attitudes held by many Europeans at various points in time, generally emphasizing the otherness of a group of people who lived and looked different and may have, at times, competed for economic resources; by identifying the strangers as ‘bad,’ these groups may have felt more justified in protecting scarce resources for themselves during hard times; and the stories created for this purpose were then passed down through generations.

 

These beliefs, and other similar ones, are discussed in John Efron’s Jews: A History. Taylor & Francis, 2013.