Author Archives: Logan Austin

About Logan Austin

Peachtree City, Georgia.

The Archer Senior Scavenger Hunt

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Brentwood, CA
Performance Date: 4/22/15
Primary Language: English

Informant: The informant in question was a sophomore screenwriting major at USC. White, female, and a Los Angeles native. She attended the Archer School, an upper-class girl’s private school in Brentwood.

 

Transcription: Umm… Oh senior scavenger hunt was all verbal! Okay, so senior scavenger hunt, it was at the beginning of senior year and there was like someone in charge and like, the person who was in the year above who was in charge of it would pass it on to their friend in the grade below and then that person would tell us all the things we had to find and we had to like, go around L.A. and sing on the Promenade and like somebody had to get a tattoo. Umm, you automatic won if you got a tattoo. Oh! and we like had to talk to people who sold drugs. (laughter) do you really love it?

Keep going.

What else? And then we would all meet at In-N-Out.

Was there some sort of award?

No.

What was the endgoal?

You just had to get as many things off the list as you could. And then there was a sleepover. Bonding was the goal.

Okay. Why is this significant to you?

Because I feel like it built teamwork and it was like a really fun activity to pair with team-building and bonding as a grade like even though it was a competition we still bonded.

Who’d you learn it from? I’m guessing the person in the grade above who passed it on?

Yeah.

Cool

Analysis: This ritual serves as a sort of initiation rite into the senior class. Rather than being passed on through the school itself, it only gets passed from senior class to senior class and no underclassman really knows the full details of the event until they’re actively taking part in it. Like many initiation rituals, it focuses on the actions of a group – in this case, the members of an upper-class Los Angeles girls’ school.

Considering how sparse the individual’s description of the event itself was, it’s clear that the true focus of the event was not the scavenger hunt itself at all. Rather, the experience of doing the strange tasks and the camaraderie that stemmed naturally from that experience produced the intended effect of the hunt, giving the girl’s a common goal and set of experiences that tied them all together as they entered their senior year, an important transitional phase in any student’s life.

The Red Truck

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Phoenix, Arizona
Performance Date: 4/27/15
Primary Language: English

Informant: The subject in question is a 20 year old girl studying screenwriting at USC. She hails from Phoenix, Arizona, while most of her extended family comes from Western Kansas.

Transcription:

This is kind of a story in my family. My dad told me this about my aunt. And uh, I don’t know. It’s weird to know someone who’s had this experience. Especially because I’m fascinated by serial killers. And I have a very personal connection. Okay, anyways. In Kansas in the 1980s there was this serial killer. And he typically strangled… young, to older women who were typically brunette and leaving them out in fields. And there was this one instance where a woman was strangled out in a field and umm her son was found a few, a few, a ways away, frozen to death, and it was assumed that the serial killer took him alongside her. Uh, so my aunt’s husband worked tirelessly on this case. He was a police officer in West Kansas. So my aunt is pregnant. She has a son, her second child. And she goes to Haze, Kansas, to see friends or get shopping done. It’s the metropolis of West Kansas because there’s nothing else. She’s getting ready to leave, 8 or 9 at night. And there’s a gas station right the edge of town. And she’s filling up her car and she notices this red truck out of the corner of her eye. And she pays for her gas and goes on her way. And she’s going down this two-lane freeway, no headlights or anything in complete darkness. And she notices one of her tires is flat and she pulls out to the side of the road and sees her tire, which was fine a few minutes ago is completely flat. And a car comes by, going the same direction as her. She sees it’s the same truck as the gas station. And my aunt gets this weird feeling in the pit of her stomach. And the guy gets out and the feeling gets worse. And then the feeling kept getting worse as he took another step closer. Her son’s next to her. She puts a hand on him, and a hand on her pregnant stomach and starts to play. And all of a sudden, another car comes from the same direction as her. And pulls up. And just as it does. The guy goes back in his truck and drives back the way he came. The car pulls up and it’s her husband. She had no idea that they were in the same town. He was in town on assignment for police work, and he was just heading back and when he saw this red truck, he got a weird feeling of his own and slowed down and they talked about it. And everything was fine, everyone okay but they agreed it was weird. Fast forward a few months and my uncle gets a call, saying we caught this serial killer. Do you want to come in and see him? We’re celebrating. And my uncle comes in and he sees that it’s the same guy from this red truck that he had seen across the highway with my aunt. And who knows what would have happened that night? She did match the profile of the women that had been killed and her son was like the young boy they found. But who knows? That story’s pretty familiar in my family but only when you’re a little older. I didn’t know it till I was older, 16 or so. And I heard it from my dad, who heard it from my sister.
Why did this story resonate with you?
I’m really interested in serial killers and serial killer lore but in a distant way, like that only happens to people I don’t know. And here it was, happening to someone I knew, or might not have known.

Analysis:

This story, a family tale, sits in a very interesting place. Textually, it reads like a classic American urban legend in the vain of “The Hitchhiker”. However, its status as a memorate and its basis in fact give it a chilling degree of realism. As the speaker points out, stories of serial killers can be quite scary but the distant nature of such events makes them seem less likely. However, a story like this proves that these events can and do happen to real people.

Particular notice must be paid to the story’s status as a family story “but only for those of a certain age”. In a way, learning this story comes as a rite of passage. A sense of maturity is bestowed upon any child deemed worthy of hearing this story. To some extent, this story could remove a sense of innocence from a child and show them that terrible, horrible things and people lie a hair’s breadth away from happening at any given point, a valuable lesson for anyone to learn.

The Story of Mr. Mauritz

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Phoenix, Arizona
Performance Date: 4/27/15
Primary Language: English

Informant: The subject in question is a 20 year old girl studying screenwriting at USC. She hails from Phoenix, Arizona, while most of her extended family comes from Western Kansas.

Basically, we’ll call him Mr. Mauritz. Mr. Mauritz was a teacher at my high school and he supposedly, allegedly slept with a student. And she was a minor so it wasn’t good. It wasn’t a good situation. And the administration found out because a teacher brought it to light. And that teacher isn’t at that institution. And Mr. Mauritz wound up getting promoted, after the girl graduated, to the director of student council, so that he had interactions with all the students. And no one knows exactly why he was promoted or if he really did sleep with this student. But I think it was and I’ve heard others say that he threatened to sue the school and they thought for some reason that they would lose. And he is now in charge of things for sleeping with a student.
Why significant?
Because he was a teacher and I saw him around school a lot. I wasn’t in student council but I had friends who were and I always saw him and always thought “you fucked a kid”.
Who’d you hear it from?
I always heard it from older kids, kids a year above me, or kids in student council. I don’t remember any specific kid telling me it
What happened to the girl?
No. That’s the thing, she was always left out of it. I don’t even know who it was and it was before I was in school.

Analysis:

This story serves as a sort of urban legend, one circulated at an ordinary high school and concerning a very mundane figure, the teacher referred to here as Mr. Mauritz. All high schools possess stories like this. Whether they are true or not is generally incidental. What is significant is that the average high school student refuses to except anything as mundane. Even the dullest exterior must possess an intriguing, possibly dark interior.

These rumors spread like wildfire and spread in such a way that no individual can ever really know where they started or who started them. It’s fairly likely that the story (with no information regarding the girl in question) does not possess any basis in reality and was merely the brainchild of a bored student with a personal vendetta against a certain teacher. However, equally likely, the story is entirely factual and due to legal concerns, all other details are sparse. This uncertainty does not make the story less interesting, in fact, quite the opposite. The fact that no one can certainly conclude in either direction makes the story all the more tantalizing for students to ponder and pass on to their peers.

Love at a Shiva

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Rockville Centre, New York
Performance Date: 4/27/15
Primary Language: English

Informant: The informant in question is a half-Jewish, half-Italian boy from Rockville Centre, New York. He currently is twenty years old and studying screenwriting at USC.

This isn’t really my story to tell but I love it a lot. It describes love in a lot of ways, and comedy, and the ebbs and flows of life. My uncle who’s not really my uncle, he’s my dad’s teammate from back in college. My parents were married at 21 and they were dating since they were 18 for the longest time, they were like the three musketeers, my mom, my dad, and my uncle. And my uncle went through a bunch of girls. And then when he was 23, 24, he was at a shiva. Which is a Jewish wake. And his mother had a friend who had a great niece and they met. And the woman was my Aunt Jill, they’ve been married for thirty years. They’re my parents’ best friends. And I love this image of a woman at a shiva for someone that she cared about, thinking “while this man is dead, there’s love to be had” and that they weren’t going to let this sadness get in the way of future happiness. Which I think is such a wonderful perspective on the world, you know, I only hope that my shiva brings someone such happiness as those two. And I love the concept of someone who would overcome the context of a shiva to say this match needs to be made. And my aunt’s always embarrassed to tell that story. And I think meeting at a shiva is the 1980s equivalent of meeting your husband on Tinder. But I think it’s lovely, I think it’s the perfect example of love: happiness comes from the oddest places. And you can’t force anything in this life. You can only put yourself in good situations and what happens will. It’s gonna throw you the cards that are meant to come your way. And it sounds really hippie and new-age-y, but maybe that’s who I am, I don’t know. And I’m not saying I’m looking forward to my next shiva, but the future Mrs. _____ could be there.
Who did you hear it from?
One of the family dinners. We had dinner with their family every week.
Is the story well-known in that extended family?
Yeah, really well-known. And their mothers wound up being best friends. It’s just the perfect family story. And it never gets old. It’s never not fascinating that that’s how they met. I guess it’s just, comedy is about irony. Things are never how they seem, there’s always some twist. But the fact that death and love are so intertwined is a comedic presence in and of itself. That such happiness and such sadness can hold hands in that way.

Analysis:

This story is a personal memorate that has become passed around an extended family unit to such an extent that it serves less as an account of actual events and more of a metaphorical reflection on the nature of human love. While the event of a shiva may seem like a staid, grave affair, a great deal of happiness can stem from it at the same time.

The story also serves as an example of the multiplicity and variation that occurs within the Jewish practice of a shiva. While some shivas naturally carry the solemnity that such an event would anticipate, this one in question possessed a degree of levity high enough that two individuals were comfortable setting up a date at it. Death, then, does not have to possess the layer of sadness that most cultures attribute to it. From each ending must stem new beginnings, a saying never more literally true than in this story.

Passover Seder

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Rockville Centre, New York
Performance Date: 4/27/15
Primary Language: English

Informant: The informant in question is a half-Jewish, half-Italian boy from Rockville Centre, New York. He currently is twenty years old and studying screenwriting at USC.

Transcription:

So I guess I’m what you would call ethnically Jewish. Judaism is as much a race as it is a religion. But my grandfather’s parents were socialists in Russia and they were chased out by the pogroms and they weren’t religious, so he was never bar mitzvahed but he wanted us to know that it was important that we were ethnically Jewish. Umm, so we always did seders. So we could cut them down so we could eat sooner. But we could do the seders and the great thing-
What are seders?
Seders are like the prayers before meals, like Passover has a seder and there are specific rituals connected to them and we all tell stories. And part of the reason I think a lot of Jews wind up in the entertainment industry is that we’re brought up telling stories. You have to read the seder stories and it goes from youngest to oldest so from a young age, you have to read the stories. And I remember I was at my uncle’s house and I couldn’t have been more than nine and eventually the other kids just gave up reading and they let me read the whole seder and I told the story of the locust and I did different voices for all of the characters and I was improvising – I mean, I was changing the Bible, which is probably cruel. But uh, I remember that I had the table rip-roaring at Seder and I was thinking “this is such a great thing” and my family was always totally up for that. And once you set the tone all the adults were up for that and they wanted to top your performance and it was always such a fun thing. Jewish holidays in particular can get really sad because they all deal with the struggle and everything that our people has always gone through but my family had a way of making it about being happy that everyone was together. And I think that’s the moral of religion as a whole: be happy with what you have and the gifts that you’ve been given. If you’re sitting at those tables with your family and everyone’s laughing and you’ve got good food and everyone’s laughing, you might as well be happy, whether you believe in God or not. Those were the best times. When your family is just really happy to all be together.

Analysis:

This particular ritual serves both as a family bonding ritual and an expression of religious faith. In most cases, the Seders serve as a reminder of the individual’s context within Judaism as a whole and a reminder of the struggles that have plagued members of that faith for eons. However, the speaker makes a clear definition of Judaism not only as a set of religious beliefs but as a cultural heritage, passed on regardless of the individual’s personal religious leanings.

The variation of this practice is also shown. While certain aspects of the seders (the telling of stories, the progression from youngest to oldest, the occasion of Passover) remain constant, other aspects can be changed, such as how in the given account, the single storyteller took over for his siblings and for the other children present or how direct quotes from religious scripture are paraphrased for comedic effect or how the overall message of the seders changes from that of recognition of past suffering to thankfulness for current happiness.