Author Archives: Makena Hudson

Weekend Liberties Admonition for the Coast Guard

Nationality: American
Age: 26
Occupation: Actor
Residence: Torrance, CA
Performance Date: April 23, 2013
Primary Language: English

“At the end of the sixth week of training… no at the uh… after the fourth week of training in the, in the Coast Guard, you get on-base liberty, which means you get an entire day to yourself where you can do whatever you want. You can go to the duty free shop, you can exercise, you can read a book, you can go to the computer lab… whatever. Then, um… during the sixth week of basic training, assuming you haven’t done anything to disrupt, you get off-base liberty, which means you get dressed up in your military dress uniform and you go off base—into the town, and you do whatever you want from eight to eight. Me personally, I went out and, uh, saw two movies. I, uh, I pigged out at a fast food place. Other people get hotels to, you know, sleep with other people on the base. Or uh, they go to the bars to get wasted—even though that’s not allowed, what they do is they get a hotel and they get roaring drunk before they have to get back to base—or at least, hide it enough so no one knows that they’re piss-drunk…

“There were six guys—they called them six pack—and they got so black-out-drunk that when they got back—they almost got away with it—they took a taxi up to the front gate, they managed to uh walk past the gate, and when they got to, to uh, their barracks, to their, to their private little room, they had to walk past their company commander office… and as soon as they walked past: bluuehhhh! [makes vomiting noise]. Their company commander was right there, they just, they almost made it, they just passed his office, and then [vomiting noise] everywhere. Guy came out, they all got busted for, like two weeks.”

 

The informant’s company commander told him this legend. The commander said that they tell this story to everyone when they are allowed to go out on weekend liberty. The commanding officers admonish the recruits: “don’t be like the Six Pack. This was a warning to training Coast Guard recruits that their position is tenuous as well as determined by themselves.

This is a good illustration of how the Coast Guard functions: part hierarchy, part brotherhood. The way in which the commanding officers disseminate rules and expectations to those under their command (done through folklore) is friendly enough to make it easy to accept as someone under the command of another.

Don’t Ever Stuff a Gun in Your Pants

Nationality: American
Age: 26
Occupation: Actor
Residence: Torrance, CA
Performance Date: April 23, 2013
Primary Language: English

“Don’t ever stuff a gun in your pants”

 

The informant learned of this proverb from military officers and his peers during basic training for the Coast Guard when he was about 19 years old. He learned that this saying came about when safeties were common in guns (when you pull back a hammer before shooting). Now double-safeties are commonly built into guns that force disable you from pulling back a hammer without pulling the trigger so if it’s dropped of stuffed somewhere, it won’t go off.

While in training, the informant said he was trained with 9mm, which officers told him, was to help him and his peers get a fell for how to use a gun. When you graduate to become a full member of the military, they will issue a different gun with a double-safety to protect from accidental discharges (and because they are more accurate and efficient). He mentioned that the Harry Potter saying: never put your wand in your pocket is a direct reference to this proverb

Humor in this instance is a good tool to help people remember safety information. Personally, I’m unaware of the workings of guns, but this proverb is helpful in reminding listeners of the mechanics of certain types of firearms.

White Chocolate Makes You Turn Purple

Nationality: American
Age: 22
Occupation: Student (Fine Arts Major)
Residence: Burbank, CA
Performance Date: April 22, 2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese, Japanese, Spanish

“If you eat white chocolate, you’ll turn purple.”

 

The informant was made aware of this belief when she was about seven years old. This was one of several stories she was told by her cousins, who were eight and 12 at the time of the telling. They had passed this on to the informant because they were vouching for it’s validity, and because it had become popular in their school.

At her cousins’ school, there was a stigma against white chocolate because select students had deemed it “gross” and admonished people for eating it by saying that only “gross” people would eat it. This small group—and later, the general populace—believed that white chocolate was not “real” chocolate. This forced the informant to abstain from eating chocolate out of fear of being punished for eating it (by being made purple). She eventually lost her taste for white chocolate over the period of time that she was afraid to eat it. This represents a way for a powerful minority group to assimilate the beliefs of the larger majority. Fear of ridicule, a powerful emotion for grade-school children, served as the driver for pushing the beliefs of those that took charge.

This saying is powerful in its ability to alter behaviors. In the hands of a few, this functioned almost as propaganda getting the masses on board with a belief they may have rejected without fear. Even for those who do not believe the warning, the shaming that it fosters can remain effective.

 

For a similar story about shaming and color changing, (and specifically, the color purple) see:

http://www.snopes.com/science/poolpiss.asp

You See Ghosts If You Believe in Them

Nationality: American
Age: 22
Occupation: Student (Fine Arts Major)
Residence: Burbank, CA
Performance Date: April 22, 2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese, Japanese, Spanish

“You only see ghosts if you believe in them.”

 

The informant was made aware of this belief when she was about seven years old. This was one of several stories she was told by her cousins, who were eight and 12 at the time of the telling. They had passed this on to the informant because they were vouching for it’s validity, and because it had become popular in their school.

The informant lamented that this presented a Catch 22, because she was still developing her position on her belief/disbelief in ghosts, so she scared herself by imagining them bobbing towards her bed at night, forcing her to hide under the covers, (in a way, her this saying became a self-fulfilling prophecy for her). The saying that was meant to scare ended up serving that purpose by causing the informant to scare herself.

This is a good example of why ghost stories are so widely spread in a variety of cultures. Beliefs like this one weight the chances of ghosts as reality in favor of their existence by perpetuating that the consequences for believing otherwise are worse than those of believing mistakenly.

La Llorona

Nationality: American
Age: 22
Occupation: Student (Fine Arts Major)
Residence: Burbank, CA
Performance Date: April 22, 2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese, Japanese, Spanish

“I don’t remember the details, but it’s this mother, in the myth, and her children drowned… or something like that, and then she died somehow. Anyway, this woman ended up dead and her children were drowned, so there was this link between La Llorona and the water… um… so the myth, the myth was that children were warned not to go out at night near pools of water because La Llorona would come to them and drown them and the key was that if you heard this woman crying and you were like, ‘ah, where are my children?’ or something spooky like that… if you heard it really close, that meant she was far away, but if you heard it really far away, that meant she was close, or something…

“My teacher told me the story that her grandfather told her, that one day, he decided to run away from home, or something like that, and it was nighttime, and he was somewhere in which this myth applied, and um… I guess he was… I always imagined he was by one of those pools, those, um… not inflatable pools, but like those gigantic ones that would stand and you would put water in them and they were really popular in, like, the 90s. I always imagined it like that, but it seemed to be some sort of water tower, some public means of storing water, and he was by it because he was thirsty and whatever, and he heard this crying, and he was by water, and he was a child, and he heard this crying, but it sounded far away, and he kind of… I don’t remember if he saw it, but he just, I think he looked into the water and he kind of saw over his—oh I think her eyes bled or something, something spooky, I think her eyes were bleeding—anyway, he looked into the water and he went, like, ‘AHHH! Jesus!’ and then he ran away, and he’s still here obviously because my teacher is still here.”

 

The informant was told this version of La Llorona in her 7th grade, Spanish class, which was dedicated to the study of Mexican culture on Fridays. La Llorona means the crier or the one who cries. After the recounting of the story about her teacher’s grandfather, she was asked by her teacher to illustrate the La Llorona tale.

The informant said the stories that stick with her most are ghost stories, which might be related to how her cousins told her that you can only see ghosts if you believe in them. She believed ghosts seemed like a neat proposal because it would mean that it’s possible to have life after death, but she also worried that it would be the a sort of half-life in which you would be stuck forever (where people would see you, but not come to know or understand you). She liked hearing these types of stories because she liked to draw frightening images as a child even though the stories themselves scared her. She also mentioned she was glad she did not live where the story applied, which is an interesting proposal because it implies that certain folklore only affect certain people from which it (supposedly) originated from.

What is most interesting about this telling of La Llorona is not the story itself (which is even incomplete), but the personal narrative that follows , which functions as a friend-of-a-friend legend. That part, tacked onto the first, more well known, part in a way, validates the original tale. The combination of the popular and the personal brings a big tale back to a human level and keeps it spreading.

 

For another telling of La Llorona, see:

http://www.literacynet.org/lp/hperspectives/llorona.html