LA Parking Prayer

Nationality: Brazilian-American
Age: 32
Occupation: Marketer
Residence: Salt Lake City, UT
Performance Date: 2/24/23
Primary Language: English

Background

This short prayer was given to the informant by a friend who had grown up in Los Angeles. The interviewee is currently living in Salt Lake City, Utah, but lived in Los Angeles for ten years. This is a prayer to find a parking spot in LA, only meant to be invoked in true desperation. She is of Latin American descent.

Text

MM: Um, Okay. It is “Mary, Mary, full of grace, help me find a parking space” and it’s used to help you find a parking space, uh, when you are looking for street parking or in a car park, a crowded parking lot.

MM: Um, and, but you have to use it very sparingly. I can’t, you can’t just like at, for, you know, you have to have been looking for a minute before you can use it.

MM: Um, I first heard it from a friend who grew up in LA and she pulled it out after we’d been searching for parking for quite a while and she said she keeps it in her back pocket for absolute emergencies. We found a parking spot immediately and it has not failed me since, but again, only used in emergencies.

Interviewer: Sparingly.

MM: Sparingly. Yes. Yes. And by emergency, I mean, you know, a Los Angeles emergency, which is there’s no valet.

Interviewer: Haha, yeah.

MM: Truly an emergency.

Analysis

This is an example of folk speech, more specifically a prayer. I had heard this prayer from the interviewee some time ago and knew it would be perfect for the archive.

As any LA driver can attest, it can be extremely difficult to find parking on the streets of Los Angeles. One can find themselves driving around endlessly, and this prayer is meant to save them from the struggle. As the interviewee states, the prayer cannot be used in any situation. Instead, it can only be invoked at a time of desperation or emergency, when hope is nearly lost for finding a parking space. This maintains a certain significance to the prayer; if it does not work, the situation might not have been desperate enough.

This example of folk speech likely evolved through the converging influences of car culture and Catholicism on Los Angeles. This prayer is invoked almost in jest, rather than it being attached to any true religious belief. The informant, notably, does not have any ties to Catholicism. Still, the prayer mentions Mary, most likely the Virgin Mary, pointing to its roots in Catholic belief. This prayer is an excellent example of how folk belief evolves from the environment and culture it finds itself in.

Star Tipping

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Graduate Student
Residence: Berkeley, CA
Performance Date: 2/24/23
Primary Language: English

Background

My best friend was raised Mormon, and all of the kids at his local Mormon sect would play “star tipping” in the field behind the church at night. He states that he doesn’t remember any significance to the practice, just that it was a game that they played. To star tip, he and the other youth at the church would pick a star in the sky and stare at it while spinning around until they fell. He is a college student, transgender, and of European descent. He left the church when he turned 18.

Text


SS: At the specific church building that we went to, there was a big field in the back and at night after a youth activity, sometimes we’d go out there and do star tipping.

SS: And so you just pick a star. Sometimes it happened to be an airplane, but you pick a star and you look at it and then you spin in circles. Well, it’s still looking at it until you fall over and all the youth would do it.

SS: And I don’t know anything more about it other than it was something that we did.

Analysis

This might just be a simple children’s game, but it is notable for the fact that it was a game shared amongst the entirety of the children among their sect, with a specific name for it. Looking online, there doesn’t seem to be much by way of “star tipping” aside from a few Tumblr posts from an ex-Mormon who mentions it in the tags.

Aside from “entertainment value,” this game may have been encouraged by the church as a way for the youth to connect with each other. Given the celestial cosmology of the Mormon faith, in which those in heaven occupy the “heavens,” this might have been a way to connect a game/practice with Mormon belief. Aside from that, the game may have been a way to pass time in the long, often boring late hours of Mormon seminary.

The Shrimp Fork

Nationality: American
Age: 57
Occupation: Lawyer
Residence: San Francisco
Performance Date: 2/22/23
Primary Language: English

Text: The Shrimp Fork

Minor Genre: nickname (toponym)

Context: My informant, JW, is a 57 year old man from Buffalo, New York, who now lives in San Francisco. The Shrimp Fork is a nickname for Sutro Tower, a radio and television tower in San Francisco that is also a tourist attraction because of its unique design and placement atop a large, hikeable hill. It is called such because of the similarity between the shape of a fork specifically made to eat shrimp with and the three-pronged top of the tower that is featured prominently in the city’s skyline. JW told me that he learned this nickname for the structure about 15 years ago, from his fiancee at the time. He claims that she invented the term herself, but that the two of them together have made it a known term amongst their social circles and beyond. His children and their friends have also spread the term. 

Analysis: The tendency to rename functional objects to be more recognizable and perhaps humorous is very endearing, as it seems so human to desire familiarity. Sutro Tower may be a perfectly good name for this interesting structure, but it is wonderfully and playfully human for a small cohort of people to give it a name that resembles something from their own lives. This nickname certainly pertains to a place-specific folk group, as it is unlikely that anybody who does not reside in San Francisco would know this term. However, there are other structures throughout the world that have both colloquial and official names. It is important to maintain the knowledge of these nicknames, as such terms offer knowledge about the culture in which these structures exist – comparing the documented title and the toponym gives us insight into what a government or city might deem important and how that differs from how the citizens of a place see and understand their surroundings. 

License Plate Game

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Primary Language: English

Ok so the game is the license plate game, and everyone has a different way of playing it, but how me and my friends back home play it, is if we’re on a long road trip or any car ride we… if we see a license plate for out of state, I’ll say the license plate like “Alabama” and punch the person closest to me, but I think that might just be like a west coast thing.

The participant is from San Diego, and plays this game with their friends there.

I personally don’t play the license plate game this way, I only push people in the car if I see a Volkswagen Beetle, then I say “punch buggy yellow” and punch someone (if the car is yellow), and I am from Ohio so maybe this is just a west coast thing or a regional thing.

Bathroom Light Prank

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 2/23/23
Primary Language: English

Text: From “around the ages 6 to 9,” BD and her friends would pull a prank in which they would go into the girls’ bathroom at school and, while people were in the stalls, turn off all the lights and run away. 

Minor Genre: Prank / Practical Joke

Context: BD is a 21 year old student at USC from Santa Monica, California. She told me that she thinks this prank is “pretty classic,” in that a lot of girls her age did this both at her school and at other schools. She said that everyone, including her, would always scream when the lights would go out like that. She remembers the feeling very well, and says that the prank still follows her through life. Even though she doesn’t scream out loud anymore, she told me that she feels the same sense of initial fear that tied into the general childhood fear of darkness, mirrors, and all the things that children do in bathrooms to scare one another. 

Analysis: I agree with BD that this is a common prank. It is interesting to analyze why so many children across cities, states, and even nations share this urge to engage in fearful activities in the bathroom. I think that part of allure of practical jokes is the aspect of mischief which, especially for children learning the thrill of being naughty, adds to the humorous outcome. Many trains of thought assert that humor comes from incongruity, and this definitely applies to this situation. While kids are being taught how to behave and to be entities in the world, the incongruity of mischief is exactly the type of exciting humor that brings them joy. Pulling any prank is mischievous, but pulling a prank in the bathroom – a space that is newly meant to be taboo because of its shared nature in schools – adds to that feeling exponentially.