Author Archives: jadendav@usc.edu

Gumbo

Nationality: African American
Age: 18
Occupation: USC Student - Art
Residence: Los Angeles, California
Performance Date: 4/21/18
Primary Language: English

Transcription:

Interviewer: “Do you have any interesting or weird family traditions?”

Informant: “We have some like recipe insert that we’ll always make. Like we’ll typically make uh… gumbo on New Years and every month our family will try to meet up for family days just cuz everybody…there’s a lot of us and the family tree is kinda confusing so they just keep everyone on the same trend and have like monthly meetups where everyone is there. They’ll say ‘Oh let’s meet up at my grandparent’s house’ and then ‘okay great’. That’s the most of it. There’s…yeah that’s pretty much it.”

Interviewer: “Is it a special type of gumbo?”

Informant: “Well the tricky part is I don’t actually know what’s in the gumbo. My grandma’s the only one that knows the recipe and we’ve tried to get her to tell us and she’ll stand there and make it with us but she won’t like let us write it down or anything so…I guess so yeah. It’s a special pot of gumbo.”

Interviewer: “Okay…what is gumbo exactly?”

Informant: “Gumbo is…it’s a southern dish that’s sorta like a soup and so the thing that makes gumbo unique is you throw in a whole bunch of different like ingredients. You’ll put in shrimp, you’ll put in sausage,chicken,crab. Pretty much any meat that you got. It’s kinda like how the tradition started back in slavery where you like made soup out of whatever sort of meat you had and since then they were like ‘ah this is actually pretty good. Let’s keep doing this now that we can like pick what meat we get’. They kinda started picking and choosing what goes in there and so…in our pot we do shrimp, and crab, and some chicken, sausage. I think that’s it? Yeah that’s in there.

Interviewer: “And how long has the gumbo tradition been going on?”

Informant: “Uhh years…and I don’t really know but they used to live in Louisiana before they moved out here and so our grandparents made it and I’m not sure who made it before them but it’s been a long way going. I don’t know if the recipe has changed much over the year but I know they’ve been cooking it forever.”

Interviewer: “And does your grandmother intend to pass it on eventually?”

Informant: “Uh…I mean eventually. I don’t think she wants to per say because she kinda likes the idea of having something to do. Like ‘it’s my pot of gumbo and I want to make it’ and every now and then we’ll try to have her explain bits and parts of it to us and…like my mom kinda knows it but she doesn’t really like cooking that much so we’re trying to get my sister to learn it since she’s kinda like the cook of the house. Otherwise…I’m not much of a cook so…I’m just trying to remember the basics of it so in case I’m like ‘shoot I need to make a pot of gumbo’, I can figure it out.”

Interviewer: “How much do you know about how to make it?”

Informant: “Hmm I know like the basics and I know the end game, and I know the stuff that goes in. It’s more like the amounts she puts in and the stuff to make the broth that’s the tricky part. I don’t know cuz it’s still a soup so I know the meat and stuff but I don’t know what parts you need for the broth and how long to cook it and that kinda stuff yet.”

Summary:

The informant’s family gathers together monthly. However, during New Years gatherings they all eat gumbo cooked by his grandmother. This gumbo is a special recipe that only she knows and hasn’t completely told to anyone else yet. It’s likely that later on, the informant’s sister will learn the recipe in order to uphold the tradition. I would like to try the gumbo myself. It sounds delicious.

T-Pose Fundamentals

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: USC Student - Animation
Residence: Los Angeles, California
Performance Date: 3/27/18
Primary Language: English

Transcription:

Interviewer: “So do you have any weird traditions in the animation department?”

Informant: “Yeah so we always have jokes about people in T-Pose. So T-Pose is the default position of…a…rig. Yeah it’s…the most plain uh zeroed out position any 3D model or rig is in. Um some people have started telling horror stories about people in T-Pose. Uh we would be working in…uh…the 2D lab and horror stories would start spreading about…you know you’re sitting in a lab alone. You’re working on your in-betweens for Eric’s class when suddenly… the lights go out. You don’t know what’s going on but all of a sudden…for a while it was something about Waluigi, the Mario character. A tposing Waluigi clips through the wall…and starts coming towards you. What do you do? And it suddenly becomes this Choose Your Own Adventure story…so it always starts the exact same of like…lights go out,a Tposing someone, sometimes it was our professors, sometimes it was heads of the department of the School of Cinematic Arts. Sometimes it was our friends. But they would always be in T-Pose and not move and just move their like…like move their body position. They would always stay in T-Pose and then move towards you. And it becomes this like Choose Your Own Adventure thing and so we called them T-Pose Hypotheticals. It was…what do you do? I mean they got like pretty ridiculous. One time there was one where it was like…okay…you are a spy during the cold war and you’re…in the…in Russia like like in the arctic and suddenly you look in a cabin and you see two tposing polar bears. They clip through the walls and start coming after you. What do you do? And that’s the Animation Tposing Hypotheticals.”

Interviewer: “That was amazing. Has that been going on before your like… year?”

Informant: “No I think our year started it because it was just us bored in the kitchen. I think Efren was the one who really ran with them but like…yeah Efren was the most creative with them and…I mean it’s even become like we started getting memes like someone posted like a picture of like a bunch of people doing yoga in the park. But they were all in T-Pose so we started joking how it ‘sounds like a Hypothetical’. Yeah.”

Summary:

T-Pose Fundamentals are a series of folk jokes or folk stories that are told throughout the Animation department. As far as we know, the tradition is one that started with the current sophomores of the animation department. It’s not known who began the tradition, but Efren is well known for performing it. Overall, it’s a form of entertainment for the animation students.

Message from Beyond

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: USC Student - Interactive Media
Residence: Los Angeles, California
Performance Date: 4/25/18
Primary Language: English

Transcription:

Interviewer: “Do you believe in ghosts?”

Informant: “I do. I do believe in ghosts and when I say I believe in ghosts, I’m not sure really to what extent I believe in them? But I’ve heard enough stories of people adamantly believing that they saw something. I’ve just seen so much that it kinda is very much stuck in my mind and even more so, there’s no way of proving that ghosts don’t exist. And that’s kinda my motto. If you can’t prove it doesn’t exist, like demons and angels and everything, you can’t say that it doesn’t exist. You know, so I don’t…I don’t necessarily, I’m not necessarily gonna force my beliefs on anyone but I’m just…if I had to say yes or no to whether ghosts exist or not, I would say yes.”

Interviewer: “Cool. Have you had any personal experience with these ghosts?”

Informant: “I haven’t but I have some family members who have. Um my aunt and my mom both have some experience with the afterlife though in very different ways. My aunt, who is my mom’s sister…she believes that she caught the orb form of ghosts on camera, which is when you take a picture and the picture shows that there are just these balls of light floating somewhere in the picture. Uh and people say that those are…those are ghosts caught on camera. It’s definitely a thing, I know it’s a thing. I don’t know too much about it but I know that she looked it up after she caught that and she very much believed that there were ghosts. She was somewhere in a different country when she took the picture. And then my mom had a really interesting experience where several years ago, um…she was on an airplane and…she was just you know minding- she was on an airplane so she didn’t really have contact with other people so she was just doing whatever. And she had this sudden…wave of comfort and felt like…felt something just at peace…uh… and it turned out that…while she had been on the plane, her dad had passed away. My grandpa. And so she…I know that she is Chrsitian and she believes in God I think. Um…I know she goes to church once in a while but…she believes that that was her dad…her dad’s like spirit as it…you know…passed to the other life. Just kinda just saying goodbye to her I guess saying ‘it’ll be okay. I’m okay. I’m happy. I love you.’ She very much thinks he was saying that he loved her. So yeah…and my mom…my mom is a very scholarly person. She’s not super religious, and so hearing that from her was like ‘Wow, I believe that that happened or I believe that you believe that for sure’. It’s weird because she didn’t know that he had passed away then but she very much remembers this experience.”

Summary:

The informant talks about her mother and aunt, both having experiences with ghosts and spirits. She says that because of stories like these, she believes in the paranormal and will continue to since it can’t be disproven. Her aunt once took a picture of a ghost’s orb form. This is when they show up in a picture as a ball of light. Her aunt looked it up afterwards and now firmly believes that she did capture a ghost on camera. The informant’s mother had an experience while riding on a plane. Suddenly, she felt very calm and warm, with no explanation as to why. When she got off the plane she was notified that her father had died. She believes the warmth she felt was the result of her father’s spirit coming to say goodbye to her and reassure her that everything was okay. It’s stories like these that prevent me from dismissing ghosts. Sure you could mark what happened to her mother as a coincidence, but there are so many similar stories to that. I see why the informant places a lot of faith in this story because it sounds realistic and perfectly reasonable. It even helps that a more scholarly person like her mother would believe it’s a ghost.

Litchfield Biker Gang

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: USC Student - Interactive Meida, Music Production
Residence: Los Angeles, California
Performance Date: 4/26/18
Primary Language: English

Transcription:

Interviewer: “You’re from Litchfield?”

Informant: “Yes.”

Interviewer: “Is that a small town or a big town?”

Informant: “Small town 8000 but between two cities that I think are 50(000) or 80000, respectively.”

Interviewer: “Are there any stories with Litchfield?”

Informant: “Um…(laughs) so okay so I don’t…so there’s not really…there’s a rope swing which is creepy but…and I’m sure that had I frequented it more, I would have found some more creepy lore there but I never really did go there. Um…but…so there really isn’t a ton of specific lore. I know the town is almost 300 years old so there’s a lot of like local history. Um…there’s like a graveyard. That kind of thing. So it’s a very uh…there are spooky places in it. But what got me laughing was…there is… and this isn’t necessarily lore as it is objectively factually true but I will continue, I will tell my kids about this. Um…there’s this group of children…we called them the LBK: Litchfield Biker Krew with a ‘k’. Because they’re basically a bunch of um… I think I was in high school when we sorta like designated them but they’re about like just this pack of like 8th graders…like not even like super big but like it was a pack of like 8th graders or something who would just bike around, be punks, smoke cigarettes. And like…yeah it was just so funny because they thought they were such badasses but we’re just like ‘heh look at those kids biking like…around and just thinking that they’re badass’. So it’s like…it’s sorta just this think like ‘oh lol that’s Litchfield Biker Crew’ like everyone sorta knew about that and it was sorta like a rich topic to explore in terms of just like…jokes and things.”

Summary:

So the informant talks about a group of bikers in his hometown, known as the Litchfield Biker Krew. The LBK, as they’re known are a group of 8th grade kids who would ride around on bikes and smoke. They were well known throughout the town. The informant plans to pass this story along to his own family one day, making him an active bearer of this legend.

The Giving Tree

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: USC Student - Interactive Media, Music Production
Residence: Los Angeles, California
Performance Date: 4/25/18
Primary Language: English

Transcription:

Informant: “Okay um one more thing. Oh yeah my mom does this thing or did this thing which we don’t really do anymore but I’ll probably do once I have my own place. Um…like with my own kids. We did this thing called the Giving Tree or the Thankful Tree or whatever the hell but basically it was just like a big poster like ‘hey what are you thankful for?’ and we would get these leaves and we would trace them. Like we would trace them on the table and write a couple of things that we were thankful for. And then just put those up for like Thanksgiving season. Um and that would be like a sort of a…um that would be something we would do pretty consistently every Thanksgiving season.”

Summary:

The informant tells me of one of his former Thanksgiving traditions, known as the Giving Tree. A big poster of a tree is hung up. The kids trace leaves and write what they’re thankful for on them. Then they hang the leaves up on the tree. The informant states that the tradition hasn’t been done in a long time. However, he still wants to continue the tradition when he has his own family. In the future he plans to be an active bearer of this tradition. I think it’s a nice tradition that’ll bring the family together and teach the kids what thanksgiving is all about.