Cooties in New York

Nationality: US
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, California
Performance Date: 16 April 2018
Primary Language: English

Context:

Madeleine Hall was raised in New York City. In a hyper urban city like that, I wondered if she had any experiences with cooties. For me, cooties were associated with playgrounds and fields and wide open spaces–my memories being children chasing each other around.

Transcript:

Owen: Do you have any memories of cooties as a kid in New York?

Madeleine: Oh yeah. I’m so bad with ages, but yeah when I was really young you always knew who had cooties. It was like a thing, like he had it or she had it. But being a girl we mostly knew which guys had it.

Interpretation: 

Basically, this speaks to the ubiquity of cooties in American children’s culture. It speaks to how children are hyper aware of gender at a very young age. At schools, children are quickly split up by gender, explaining how the idea of cooties could take hold. For those unaware, cooties are a gendered “disease” of sort that boys can catch from girls, and vice versa. Of course, there are no actual medical symptoms.

Bikes in Traffic–Biking Customs

Nationality: US
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, California
Performance Date: 16 April 2018
Primary Language: English

Context:

Madeleine is a sophomore at USC. She recently bought a bike, and in addition to riding it to class, had been going on trips all over East Los Angeles. Since biking downtown is especially dangerous, she observed the unofficial codes and movements of more experienced bikers to navigate the streets.

Transcript:

Madeleine: Maddy Hall, amateur biker, uhh for a short while. Recently was downtown observing other bikers so that I didn’t get hit by a car, uhh, and, you know they, the main way to get a car to notice you is to hold you hand out to the left, right in front of the car. And they you just go, you don’t look, which is really messed up, um. But then if the car hits you its their fault. And I went to a bike shop and this guy came in and he was talking about his settlement and I was like “what happened” and he was like “oh, I got hit by a car, like they turned right while I was going, um I think the main thing with bike culture is that it’s never your fault.

Interpretation:

Since Maddy has recently started biking around Los Angeles, she is just joining an unofficial community of bikers. There is no organization, but as with all communities, there are standard ways of being, in other words, folklore. You get the sense from her story that bikes tend to band together against cars in an us vs them sort of mentality. This strengthens the biker community. One of their customs, which is folklore because it is not an official traffic law, is merely sticking a hand out in front of a car to make one’s presence known.

Haunted Dorm/Former Morgue

Nationality: US
Age: 23
Occupation: Student
Residence: Sewanee, Tennessee
Performance Date: 21 April 2018
Primary Language: English

Context:

Will Lord is my brother. I visited him at his University recently. He attends the University of the South, also known as Sewanee. Given its regal name, one would assume that the school is rich in tradition and folklore. One would be correct. The school was established in 1857. Given its small student body, many feel compelled to join fraternities and societies which each have their own collection of folklore. The school itself is full of legends. While walking around campus, I recorded him talking about famous locations, legends, etc.

Transcript:

Will: This one here, this is where I lived freshman year. It was a morgue way back in the day. Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t have any ghost stories from there but a ton of people say they’ve heard things or seen ghosts or just had sleep paralysis.

Interpretation:

This is another example of a vague hauntedness. Will could not point to exactly what goes on within the space, but assured me it was haunted. Like so many folk stories about haunted spaces, it once dealt with death. We often hear of a haunted space once being a burial ground, a morgue, a hospital etc.

Getting a Cold with Wet Hair

Nationality: US
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, California
Performance Date: 16 April 2018
Primary Language: English

Context:

Madeleine Hall is Junior at USC, studying Communications. When I set out to explain folklore to her, for some reason my mind went straight to folk remedies and I gave her several examples of these, and then got into general folk beliefs around sickness. Obviously, my niche explanation led to this piece of folklore she then provided.

Transcript:

Madeleine: There are two parts of it, though. The first part is my Mom used to say that you can’t go outside with your hair wet because you’ll get a cold when it was cold out, or really hot out, doesn’t really matter, you’ll just get a cold. Uhhm, annndd, the other one is that you can’t go to bed with your hair wet, which really makes no sense, uhm, but now I dry my hair before bed every night, because I’m not gonna go to bed with my hair wet.

Interpretation:

This is something I investigated to see if there is any scientific truth to it. It seems that there is no science behind this claim, but I had also heard it before. Many people had, it seems, because after typing only a few words into Google, Google auto filled the rest of my search. Like drinking eight glasses of water a day, or the above wet hair folk belief, many people often hear these things over and over. With the Internet, people can finally seek out their validity.

Movies on Christmas Eve

Nationality: US
Age: 55
Occupation: Lawyer
Residence: Columbia, South Carolina
Performance Date: 25 April 2018
Primary Language: English

Context:

Leighton Lord is my father. Given this relation to me, I was interested in procuring some folklore that both of us participated in, but obviously from his perspective as he and my mother were the ones who set the traditions that we followed. Another unique perspective he has is being instilled in Southern traditions after twenty two years spent in Columbia, South Carolina following his marriage to my mother, a native South Carolinian. He grew up in Delaware, and was fascinated upon arriving in the South and witnessing the obsession with tradition and particularly talk about ancestors. I collected several pieces of folklore from him during a recent trip he made to Los Angeles. He currently practices law.

Transcript: 

Owen: Can you talk about our Home Alone tradition? From your perspective.

Leighton: I guess from my perspective, we wanted to have traditions, have traditions that were fun, that everyone enjoyed. I think everyone in our family enjoys movies. It was kind of the easiest thing. Kind of doing the same thing every year. Forced us to be in the same room…you know…the older you get. It’s harder now to do things like that.

Interpretation:

Small family traditions like this one are interesting because as a kid the context of most of your life is your family and your household. So our tradition of watching the movie Home Alone seemed a uniquely Lord tradition to me. Of course, as I grew older and spent time around more and more people, I learned that many families watch a Christmas themed movie on Christmas Eve and many specifically watch Home Alone. It was also interesting hearing about this tradition from the man who started it. As you can tell from his rather general explanation, he simply felt a need to establish a tradition of some sort on a date where every family seems to be doing something together.