License Plate Game

Nationality: American
Age: 16
Occupation: student
Residence: Encino, CA
Performance Date: 3/31/07
Primary Language: English

Interviewer: Long drive.  Do you know any games you can play in a car?

Informant: Just a game that you play but it’s not a real game.  I used to play it on the way to, like, football games and stuff.  But now I usually have my phone.  Anyway it’s not real, it’s not a real game.

Interviewer: Sure it’s real.

Informant: You want me to tell you about it? It’s stupid. I still do it sometimes. I don’t really do it anymore.

Okay, so if you see a license plate from another state, you get to punch someone in the car once, and if it’s from another country, you get to punch him three times, and rare cars count too—like you can do punch buggy so you punch someone if you see a VW bug as well. And the new ones count too. Not just the old kind. I don’t really play that anymore, though.  Unless I’m with little kids.  And then sometimes I let them punch me because it doesn’t hurt.

Informant is sixteen and lives in a suburb; admits that many of his waking hours are spent in a car.  His unwillingness to admit to playing the game might indicate that he is transitioning out of the group it’s aimed at, which, in his estimation, is young children.   The reluctance to even discuss the game, based on the idea that games are for kids younger than he is, may indicate him wanting to be identified with an older group; he might also see himself as too advanced to need geography lessons from his parents while in the car, and too sophisticated to be excited by the novelty of seeing a license plate from another place, or an unusual car.

The UCLA Cheer

Nationality: American
Age: 77
Occupation: retired dentist and underwater photographer
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/25/17
Primary Language: English

Informant found this carved into a desk in the medical library at UCLA in 1967, and shared it with his fellow students.  They would often chant it together during difficult exercises, like dissection.  Informant recognizes that it was a way of cementing in-group identity, establishing solidarity and masculinity (particularly through some of the more homophobic and misogynistic wording), and when dissecting corpses, pushing away thoughts of mortality with something coarse and crass.  Also, since most of his fellow students were young men living at home, informant suspects that such liberal use of profanity helped him and his fellow students to feel more adult.

Informant, now 77 and retired, still uses this cheer when doing something difficult or complicated, or when looking for his glasses.

Informant:

So you use this however you want.  I used it a lot in the dissection lab, you know, because the corpses didn’t bitch about it.  I did it in a whatchacallit, female monks, in a convent, when I was putting together a wedding cake for my dental assistant.  The nuns were furious.  You ready?

Interviewer: Ready.

Informant:

Okay.

Ahem.  It doesn’t work if you’re quiet about it, though.

Cocksucker, motherfucker, eat a bag of shit!

Douchebag dicklicker bite yer mother’s tit!

We’re the very best and all the others suck.

UCLA, UCLA, rah rah fuck!

 

Prejudiced beliefs about Jewish People

Nationality: Caucasian
Age: 61
Occupation: Private Chef
Residence: Santa Monica
Performance Date: 4/16/17
Primary Language: English

Informant related this while at tea, when interviewer mentioned a Jewish holiday in passing.

First of all, I don’t believe any of this, but these are things my grandparents said to my mother and she said to me.

I did tell you before, didn’t I? How my grandfather used to take my grandmother to the opera, and he had a box because he was a successful early ad magnate or tycoon or what have you, and he would pick out the Jew in the audience by their pointed ears. I never asked for an explination because you know, you don’t need one with something that batty.

My mother grew up in Indiana and they had a cook and a maid and one day, you know, Mom and I were driving up at 19th and California, there’s a little tiny temple school, and my mother says in ths really sweet voice she used sometimes, “when I was growing up, my I was told by the maid that Jews took Christian babies and ate them and drank their blood.”

I think it must have been the German help because my mother never saw her parents and they tended to try to at least keep their prejudices, you know, tasteful. At no point did I ever press my mom for more details about this because, you know I was stunned.  Schtunned.

Informant’s grandparents are of English and German extraction, and their beliefs do reflect historical attitudes held by many Europeans at various points in time, generally emphasizing the otherness of a group of people who lived and looked different and may have, at times, competed for economic resources; by identifying the strangers as ‘bad,’ these groups may have felt more justified in protecting scarce resources for themselves during hard times; and the stories created for this purpose were then passed down through generations.

 

These beliefs, and other similar ones, are discussed in John Efron’s Jews: A History. Taylor & Francis, 2013.

 

PE Possession

Nationality: American
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/21/17
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Informant Information:

Jaden Davis is a student at the University of Southern California. He is originally from Smyma, GA, before moving to Los Angeles, CA for college.

Urban Legend:

“Have you been to the physical education building? Legend has it that if you go into the physical education building and you go all the way down to the bottom floor. There are lights in the hallway but they won’t turn on no matter what. Apparently one time there was an earthquake and 2 kids who happened to be down in the basement. Well the basement kind of caved in and the kids were buried in the rubble. They were presumed dead. But when they were repairing the damages people go down there and clean up the rubble but when the halls finally clear the bodies weren’t there. If you go down in that hallway, you can sometimes hear the sound of them screaming before the rubble fell on them. There’s also a door at the end of that hallway. The door has no handles but it can be opened from the inside. Now, if you go in that hallway on the night that they died which was March 8th, the door might be open and in that door is a bill collector to collect all your tuition. Just kidding there’s no bill collector, but if you walk into the door legend says one of the kids will take over your body and the kid possesses you till midnight. This is why kids wake up and don’t know where they are.”

Q: Where did you hear about this legend?

“One morning me, Eva, and Jack were in the physical education building. Some guy comes up to me and starts telling me this story.”

Q: Had you heard of this legend prior to your visit?

“Well Jack told me the physical education building was creepy, so I assumed there was stuff going on.”

Analysis:

Though I am also a student at the university, I have never heard of the urban legend that the informant mentioned. After doing more research,  I couldn’t find any information on the event that inspired the urban legend.

Gatto Mammone

Gatto Mammone, meaning Mammon cat, is one of the creatures of myth in Italy. Long time ago there was a woman who had two daughters, one is ugly and one is very beautiful. Surprisingly, the woman loved the ugly daughter more and they were jealous of another daughters’s beauty. One day they decided to sent the beautiful daughter to a curse fairy to ask for a sieve. On her way to the castle of the fairy, she met a man who helped her and told her how to behave to find the object she sough after. In the castle, she must help the cats to do housework. The Gatto Mammone, who lives in the castle, is thankful and gives her what she asked for, along with a warning: on her way back home, she must not turn at the call of the donkey, but only when she hears a rooster. As she does so, a beautiful star is magically embedded in her forehead. After she came back, her sister also wanted to get the beautiful star so she went to the castle as well. However, she was shunned away by the cats. On her way back, she turns at the bray of the ass, and a donkey’s tail is magically embedded in her forehead.