Category Archives: Game

“Levitating” at a Slumber Party

Nationality: American
Age: 57
Occupation: Housewife
Residence: Irvine, CA
Performance Date: 4/27/13
Primary Language: English

The informant discusses a game she would play with her friends at slumber parties when she was a child, which involves levitating someone.  She holds this game as a fond memory from her childhood growing up in Fullerton, CA.  The informant is now 57 so the game was played in the mid to late 1960s.

The informant explains that late at night all the girls at the slumber party would choose one girl who they would try to levitate that night.  The chosen girl would lie down flat on her back and every other girl would gather around her sitting down with legs folded underneath you.  Each girl would put both hands with their first two fingers under the chosen girl and the girl would go into a trance-like state.  From person-to-person around the circle they would say, “Your bones are turning, your bones are turning.”  After that is repeated enough all of the girls would rotate saying, “you’re dead, you’re dead.”  Then at some moment when people felt that the chosen girl was light or in a trance they would try to lift person with two fingers.  The informant notes that all the girls thought that the person did indeed feel as light as a feather.  There was a belief that they had somehow lightened the girl.

This folklore shows young girls interests in magic and the supernatural.  The act of trying to levitate a girl indicates each girl’s curiosity with magical powers as well as themes of death and altered states as seen with the lines “you’re dead” and “your bones are turning.”  The game demonstrates young girls exploring with ideas of mortality and life after death for the first times.  Understanding more complex ideas such as death is important in this time of life.

Vagina Peeking

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student; Student Worker in USC Housing
Residence: Compton, California
Performance Date: 4/13/2013
Primary Language: English

“You ask someone if they want to see a vagina, and usually the answer is “yes.”  So you ask them to put their palms together and hold their hands out so one hand is on top of the other.  They have to spread their fingers, and then you put your palms together and spread your fingers and put your hands between their fingers.  Then you ask them to open their hands and look inside.  It’s a vagina!”

My informant for this piece of folklore heard this from a friend when she was in middle school.  She felt that a lot of kids in middle school were sharing this with one another and asking if people wanted to see a vagina to the point where it got old.  The age group amongst which this folklore is shared is important because it is around this age that school kids start sex education and grow increasingly curious about their bodies.  For children go around school demonstrating to one another the anatomy of the female sex organ shows that they are getting familiar with their bodies and, in a way, socially educating each other in humorous ways.

Bloody Thumb Trick

Nationality: Chinese
Age: 60
Occupation: Retired
Residence: Torrance, California
Performance Date: 4/26/2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese

“Use the left hand, and bend at the first joint of the thumb.  Bend the right hand thumb in the same way, but cover the right hand thumb joint with your index and middle fingers.  You can put your two thumbs together to form what looks like a full thumb, but your index and middle fingers are covering the joints of both thumbs.  So it looks like you’re just covering your left thumb with two fingers.  It looks natural to little kids.  So when I start moving my right hand up, it looks like my thumb is getting pulled off or broken, right?  And then, you know, I sometimes put some type of red thing in between the joints, like ketchup, and it looks like I’m bleeding.  I mean, of course, we say before we do it, “Do not repeat this” in case you guys wanted to pull your thumbs off.”

My informant has done this trick many times for little children in order to entertain them.  The first time he had seen it, he said, was when an adult had shown it to him in order to try and scare him or make him wide-eyed in wonder.  I, myself, had first seen this trick done by my uncle who was trying to entertain my brother and me.  The trick is more like a practical joke on children to fool them into thinking that it is possible to pull your thumb off and then reattach it later.  I remember wondering for quite some length of time at how my uncle managed to pull his finger apart.  The trick, while it means to keep children occupied for long periods of time, also seems to poke fun at children’s ignorance because it toys with their young minds while the adults and less naïve share a quiet laugh.

Toothpick Star Trick

Nationality: Chinese
Age: 60
Occupation: Retired
Residence: Torrance, California
Performance Date: 4/26/2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese

“You take five toothpicks and break it in half, but not enough so the halves separate, just enough so that there are still some fibers holding the halves together.  The halves will be at a little less than a ninety-degree angle, right?  Then you put them together so the broken part of the toothpicks are in the center and almost touching.  It will form a kind of five point star, but it’s kind of compressed.  So what you need to do is make sure that the surface is a smooth and slippery surface, and then you put drops of liquid in the middle, and then when the liquid enters the interior of this, uh, figure, it gets automatically pushed out because the liquid kind of levels itself off and it kind of pushes the rest of the frame open so it looks like a star.”

My informant learned this folklore from some older children when he was around five years-old.  He remembered being at a wedding ceremony with a bunch of older kids, and they were asked to keep him and his younger brother company, and that trick was one of the things they had taught them.  He believes that this trick is used mainly to entertainment purposes because, as a young kid, he thought it was just the coolest thing in the world to watch a star come to life before his eyes from just five toothpicks.  The movement of the toothpicks, he said, was magical and mesmerized him as a child.

I definitely agree with my informant’s interpretation of the child’s game: it is mainly used to entertain children during ceremonies or gatherings of socializing adults.  The folklore seems to be passed on from one child to a younger one, representing a culture that has some sort of separation between generations—while the adults socialize at their events, the children are left to play amongst themselves, so consequently, they come up with their own forms of play—games, tricks, jokes, etc.  This toothpick star trick was probably passed down as a result of boredom in children circles.

Bloody Mary and Biggie Smalls

Nationality: American
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: Torrance, California
Performance Date: 4/26/2013
Primary Language: English

Bloody Mary is a widely known folklore where, typically, tween girls stand in front of a bathroom mirror with the lights out, a few lit candles, and recite “Bloody Mary” three times while staring at their reflection.  According to popular belief, Bloody Mary is supposed to appear in the mirror either to scratch the girls or write in blood on the mirror.

My informant, though a guy, has known of this popular belief since his time in middle school when his own girl-friends and younger sister had tried it to test its truth value.  The reason my informant had brought up this folklore, however, was not to interpret the obvious meaning of the Bloody Mary folklore (young girls adjusting to the idea of beginning puberty and menstruation), but rather to confess that he had taken part in a more masculine version of the folk belief: Biggie Smalls.

Played out the exact same way that Bloody Mary is done, Biggie Smalls (also known as Notorious B.I.G. in popular culture) is supposed to appear in the mirror and shoot the person who recites his name in the face.  My informant had not actually heard this folklore from anyone, but rather witnessed it on television in the Comedy Central show South Park.  Shortly after seeing this episode, he had convinced some younger, more gullible boys to try it out.  Unfortunately, Notorious B.I.G. did not appear in the mirror, nor did he shoot anyone in the face.

It makes sense that the Bloody Mary folk belief would be canonized in a very successful show like South Park because the folk belief is so well known.  South Park is known for taking its own spin on current events, pop culture, and politics, so being that Bloody Mary is a large part of tween girl pop culture, perhaps the writer was curious to know why no such folklore existed for the boys.  The play on the folklore is meant to poke fun at the absurdity of the belief as well as the boys’ feigned bravery as they take turns standing on the stool to look in the mirror and recite “Biggie Smalls.”  The absurd part of the whole thing is that the writer chose Biggie Smalls of all people to appear and kill innocent children—but I guess that is what makes the whole concept humorous.

Annotation: Parker, Trey. “Hell on Earth 2006.” South Park. Dir. Trey Parker. Comedy Central. NY, 25 Oct. 2006. Television.