Author Archives: Julia Zucker

Mary Brown

Nationality: Mexican-American
Age: 20
Occupation: USC Student
Residence: USC
Performance Date: April 23, 2015
Primary Language: English

*Note: Taylor is a member of the student organization USC Troy Camp, a group that mentors/tutors students in the South Central L.A. area and raises funds during the year to send 200 elementary schoolchildren from South L.A. to a week-long summer camp in Idyllwild, CA. This week-long camp is completely run by the counselors, and through the year many legends and traditions have developed that are upheld/told each year at camp, carried on by newer counselors as older ones graduate. Because I am also a member of Troy Camp, she didn’t provide any context for this, so I figured I’d do so to minimize confusion. This particular story is the story of “Mary Brown,” which we tell to the 5th grade students (the oldest) when they spend a night in tents instead of their cabins.

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INFORMANT: “I’m going to tell it like I’d tell it to the kids, okay? Okay. So… years and years ago, kids just like you were coming to Troy Camp for a great week at camp. They were so excited, and on the first day everyone was running around and making friends. Everyone except one. There was a little girl named Mary Brown, and she stood in the corner and didn’t talk to anyone – she was so shy. She would just stand in the corner and stare at her sparkly red shoes. The kids started to make fun of Mary, asking why she never played with anyone else and making fun of her red shoes. But no matter what they said, Mary would just stand there silently, staring down at her shoes. The bullying got much worse, and no matter what the counselors did, they couldn’t stop it. One day in the dining hall, a girl walked up to Mary Brown and started making fun of her shoes. At first, Mary was quiet and just stared down. But suddenly, she grabbed the fork from her plate and brought it down right on the bully’s hand – stabbed her in the hand with the fork. Silent the whole time, even as the bully screamed and cried. Her counselor took her aside and tried to reason with her, told her they were going to have to call her parents for breaking the rules and hurting another camper. But Mary said nothing… she just stared down at her red shoes. Her counselor tried that night to call Mary’s parents to come pick her up, but she couldn’t get through to anyone. The number was disconnected. So the counselor went back to the cabin, and all the girls were fast asleep in their beds… except one. Mary. Mary Brown was nowhere to be found. The counselors all panicked. They searched, they looked everywhere, and they just couldn’t find her. Finally, in the middle of the night, some counselors went down to the river, and that’s where they found her. There she was, standing on a rock in the middle of the river, dripping wet, holding a fork and staring down at her red shoes. “Mary, Mary! Please come back!” they yelled to her. They begged her to come back, to let them help her. After many… after many minutes of this, she finally looked up. She looked them straight in the eyes, raised the fork, and without saying a word, STABBED HERSELF, again and again and again with the fork until her body fell limp into the river. The water washed her right away, and no search party or the Idyllwild police was ever able to find her body. And now, every seven years, a couple forks go missing from the dining hall, and one camper falls victim to the wrath of Mary Brown, who comes click-clacking into the cabin in her sparkly red shoes, and STABS them with her fork. It’s been said you can hear her approaching because she scrrrrrrrrrratches the outside of the cabin door with her fork, scrraaaaaatches along the door. And… I hate to say it, but this year is the seventh year since the last incident. So watch out, kids, listen carefully for the fork on the door. And tell someone right away if you ever catch a glimpse of a pair of sparkly red shoes walking through the forest.”

 

This legend is cool because I’m fairly certain it’s completely unique to Troy Camp – at least under the name “Mary Brown.” One day I got curious and googled ‘Mary Brown ghost story,’ and found almost nothing similar to our story. Mary Brown is also interesting because there tends to be one counselor who tells it best, and they’ll tell the story to the campers until they graduate, at which time the job of primary storyteller is passed down to another counselor. This year, the guy who usually tells Mary Brown to the campers is graduating, so nobody knows who’s going to tell the story next year at camp. The story changes a little bit with each person who tells it, so there’s no way of knowing how the story began. No one in Troy Camp knows what year they started telling Mary Brown, but it’s an established tradition now.

“Mary Brown” also exemplifies the difference between a story like “La Llorana” and a regular ghost story – legends like La Llorana tend to have a message, a rule to obey. Contrarily, Mary Brown exists just to scare the kids! Ghost stories don’t usually have messages or morals, they’re for entertainment purposes only. One could argue that Mary Brown teaches campers not to bully other campers, but the bullying seems a little beside the point. I’ve also never known counselors to actually go around with forks on the cabin doors, because that would probably be too scary.

Meteor Candy

*Note: Taylor is a member of the student organization USC Troy Camp, a group that mentors/tutors students in the South Central L.A. area and raises funds during the year to send 200 elementary schoolchildren from South L.A. to a week-long summer camp in Idyllwild, CA. This week-long camp is completely run by the counselors, and through the year many legends and traditions have developed that are upheld/told each year at camp, carried on by newer counselors as older ones graduate. Because I am also a member of Troy Camp, she didn’t provide any context for this, so I figured I’d do so to minimize confusion. This particular story is the story of the meteor candy, which we tell to campers outside on a big grassy field under the stars at night.

COLLECTOR (myself): So tell the story we tell the kids, and then also explain what we do with the candy.”

 

INFORMANT: “Okay, so we’re sitting out on the field with our cabin, and we tell them we have a very special story to tell. Okay, so…

Years ago, before any of us were in Troy Camp, there was a family who lived in Idyllwild in a little cabin up in the mountains. There was a little girl and her mother and father, and one day the mother got very sick, and the girl and her father went out down the mountain to try to get the medicine that could save her. They walked many miles to town and got the medicine, but as they were walking back through the forest, suddenly the sky FLASHED and something huge fell from the sky. BOOM! It was a giant meteor! It crushed all the trees and sent smoke and debris everywhere, and the girl and her dad got separated. They called out and called out, but they were too far away – they could barely hear each other. There was so much smoke and it was so dark that neither one could see the other. The girl sits down in defeat and begins to cry. She picks up a piece of the meteor and throws it in anger… but when it hits the ground, it creates a bright spark! The girl has an idea. She picks up more pieces of the meteor and throws them, creating sparks each time. Suddenly, from all the way across the clearing, through the smoke, she sees a spark. Her father has seen the sparks, and now he’s throwing pieces of the meteor too!! The girl and her dad keep throwing meteor pieces and making sparks until they’re close enough to hear each other and then to see each other. They gave each other a big hug and continued back up the mountain to give the mother her medicine. The meteorite had cleared a big hole in the forest, a lot like the field we’re sitting in right now. But the best part was that the candy shop down the road got little bits of the meteor all over it, so the candy they make still has liiiittle pieces of the meteorite in it. Did you notice the candy shop we passed on the way up [of course, we didn’t pass a candy shop, but none of the kids were looking out for one, so this part gives the story more validity]? We have some of these candies for you tonight.

And then we give each camper a mint Lifesaver, but like they don’t know it’s a Lifesaver, and we tell them to turn to a partner and chew the Lifesaver. And when they bite into the Lifesaver, usually it makes a tiny little spark in their mouths. It’s really cool, I don’t know why it does that.

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Thoughts:

This is one of my favorite TC traditions, because the younger kids are usually totally amazed. Some of the older kids figure out that the candy is just a Lifesaver, or they look for the candy shop on the bus ride back down the mountain and notice it doesn’t exist, but most of the campers are completely captivated by the meteor story. It helps because we tell the story in a big clearing, so we can pretend that’s the spot where the meteorite hit many years before. After we tell the story, usually the cabins lay out and look at the stars, because a lot of the campers haven’t really seen many stars in their lifetime because they’ve never left LA.

The story doesn’t have much of a message, but it’s a fun way to bond the cabins and contribute to Troy Camp lore to make the campgrounds seem almost magical. This story, like Mary Brown, is told slightly differently by each counselor who tells it, though the general elements remain the same.

 

Yiddish Grandpa Jokes/Pranks

Nationality: Caucasian
Age: 57
Occupation: Singer-songwriter
Residence: Lafayette, CA
Performance Date: April 23, 2015
Primary Language: English
Language: Yiddish

*My mother told me these stories about her father, my grandfather, specifically, but also mentioned that most of them were common among older Jewish men in general, specifically Jews who identified with the Yiddish aspect of Jewish culture.

INFORMANT: “One of [the jokes] was he would make a bet with you about almost anything, and he would say, ‘I bet you…’ Oh shoot, what was it called? … It was called a ‘brass figliggy with an oak leaf cluster,’ and he would always bet us, ‘I’ll bet you can’t… I’ll bet you a brass figliggy with an oak leaf cluster,’ and we were like ‘OH OK THAT SOUNDS COOL,’ and we would do whatever he wanted, and I guess it wasn’t until we got older that one of us said, you know, ‘Well, where’s my figliggy with an oak leaf cluster?’ And then, as soon as you say it out loud you’re like… a figliggy? What even is that? He just made the whole thing up! But it sounded all official because of the, you know, the oak leaf clusters on military medals. But he played us for years!”

“Also, he used to do this thing with us that his mother used to do with him when he was a baby. And it was a little Yiddish folk song with a… he would put you on his knees, and I’m sure he did this to you, he would bounce you up and down, and he would sing [note: these are Yiddish words I have absolutely no idea how to spell, so I’m just going to write them as phonetically as possible. Yiddish isn’t really a written language, so this is the best I can do, my apologies!] ‘Ya shelipta guy yinkus voren raftsa lata tigala, tigala y yazala na yashava, HOOT MAHN!’ What it means in Yiddish is, basically, Yoshala, who’s this little guy, rode to the market on his sheep or on his goat, and then on the way back, the goat rode on Yoshala. I know, so stupid. But then he would… oh wait, but then the ‘hoot mahn,’ we have no idea where that came from because that’s Scottish. His parents just threw that in. But the very last thing they would say was ‘Coo coo la fligala’ and they would point somewhere else. In Yiddish it means ‘Look, look! A little bird!’ And then when you looked, they would tickle you under the chin. Stupid little games like that.”

“He also used to make this thing he called a ‘hibbity-gibbits.’ He would take an apple and he would make… like a zigzag like Charlie Brown’s shirt around, and he would open it up and take the core out of the apple, and then he would put it back together so you could barely see that it had been cut at all. And then he’d give it back to you like it was a regular apple, and you would bite into it and it would fall apart and there was no core.”

 

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My grandpa was a notorious prankster, and apparently these pranks and pranks like them were pretty common among Jewish grandfathers. They’re all along the lines of the classic grandpa joke “Pull my finger,” but with distinctively Yiddish twists. I can remember my grandpa sitting me on his lap and singing that strange Yiddish song about Yoshala and the goat, so these pranks have a lot of personal significance.

Tintamarre

Nationality: Canadian-American
Age: 55
Occupation: Professor
Residence: Oakland, CA
Performance Date: April 21, 2015
Primary Language: English
Language: French, Acadian

*Note: The informant, Kate, grew up in Canada.

INFORMANT: “Now, I didn’t grow up in this part so they didn’t really do this in Alberta or anything, but one year in high school my friends and I took a trip to New Brunswick for National Acadian Day. That’s on August 15, and it’s mostly celebrated in Acadia, which was a colony of France, so Acadians consider themselves descendants of the French colonists who lived in Acadia. Anyhow, we traveled to New Brunswick and while we were there I learned about one of National Acadian Day’s traditions, which is called tintamarre. Essentially, what that is is on Acadian Day people go through the streets making as much noise as possible with noisemakers and instruments or whatever they can find. It’s supposed to symbolize the solidarity of Acadia and basically to just remind people that Acadians are there.”

—

I looked up tinamarre after Kate told me about it, and it looks like it was inspired by the French folk custom “Charivari,” also known as chivaree, where people made a ruckus outside the homes of newlyweds. Because Acadia was a French colony, it could be argued that tintamarre is the Acadians’ way of holding onto their French roots and feeling connected to their heritage. In this way, the lore custom when the French settlers colonized Acadia, and it’s grown into a custom that’s uniquely its own but is also inspired by its French background. The word itself means “din” or “clangour” in Acadian French. I thought it was interesting that Kate considered the custom significant even though it didn’t directly apply to her. While it’s considered a Canadian custom, it doesn’t apply to all Canadians, or even all French Canadians, but rather is only totally relevant to Acadians. However, it seems that Kate still counts tintamarre as a Canadian custom worth mentioning.

Rutgers Jokes

Nationality: Caucasian
Age: 82
Occupation: Retired
Residence: Walnut Creek, CA
Performance Date: April 28, 2015
Primary Language: English

*Note: The informant, Harriet, is my grandma. She attended college at Rutgers University in New Jersey!

 

INFORMANT: “Well, there were a lot of jokes about the football team, the Scarlet Knights. They weren’t very good. West Virginia had a lot of jokes about us. And then there were the usual jokes about Rutgers kids being stupid, Rutgers kids being idiots. It was all pretty generic, most of the jokes could really be applied to anyone or anything. But one of my favorites was the one about the cemetery. It was … there was … a little boy and his mother were walking through a cemetery and they passed a tombstone that said ‘Here Lies a Rutgers Graduate and a Great Man.’ And the kid looks confused and he says to his mom, ‘I don’t get it,’ and she asks ‘Why not?’ And he asks, ‘Why are there two people buried here?'”

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While the cemetery joke was pretty general, Rutgers jokes are a good example of the wider category of sports or college rivalry-related jokes. Almost every college has a direct rivalry with other colleges, whether it’s based on sports, academics, or something else entirely. With this competition always comes a slew of jokes, often very basic and general, that demean the other team, emphasize their shortcomings and failures, and downplay their triumphs. These jokes build on the lore of each particular school, strengthening bonds between its students and alumni, and enriching campus culture.

Generic jokes, I suppose, are also a form of folklore all their own, because they are blank slates to which any number of things can be applied. They aren’t specific enough to be blason populaire, but rather they’re so general that they can be used as a quick put-down for virtually anything.