Tag Archives: high school

Calling “shotgun” for a car

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: College Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/24/13
Primary Language: English

The informant describes a game his friends and he would play at home throughout high school and still today in college.  He recounts many times fighting over spots in the car by playing the game, “shotgun.”

Shotgun is a game involving a group of people about to drive somewhere and get into the car.  The game involves deciding who gets to sit where in the car.  The driver takes the driving seat, but the second best seat is generally accepted as the “shotgun” or the passenger seat in the front.  The goal of the game is to get the “shotgun” seat by calling “shotgun” out while the car is visible.  Another individual can steal the “shotgun” seat if they yell out, “blitz” after “shotgun” is yelled.  This indicates that the other person is blitzing the “shotgun” call and getting the front seat.

Interestingly enough the phrase “riding shotgun” originated in 1919 and was later used in print and especially film depictions of wagons and stagecoaches in Wild West movies.  The game is commonly played among teenagers who have recently acquired their licenses.  This shows an interesting liminal stage teenagers enter when they first gain the ability to drive in high school and it makes sense that there are traditions or games that are popular among this transition.

Pre-show theater traditions

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 30, 2013
Primary Language: English

My informant describes himself as a “theater kid” in high school. He told me the rituals he and the other cast members go through before every show they perform. He said that the male and female members of the cast start out separately, and that they have slightly different traditions. This is his description:

“I obviously don’t know all that much about what the girls do before a show, because it’s kept secret. I do know they listen to… What is that 90s song? Oh, it’s ‘If You Wanna Be My Lover’ by the Spice Girls. And they listen to that and dance around, and I don’t really know what else they do. But the boys… There is a knife that has been kept up in the suspended ceiling of the boys dressing room for several years know, and we use the same knife to cut up lemons every show. And then we listen to Bohemian Rhapsody, and jump around and are crazy, and everyone eats a slice of lemon and throws it in the urinal. I don’t know who started the lemon tradition, but I know that the senior class that was there when I was a freshman… it had already been there for a few years when they were freshmen. So that’s about ten years now. So after the lemon eating, they do a stupid chant. It’s really sexist and terrible, so I don’t think I should repeat it. I actually didn’t participate in it for awhile because I was like, ‘This is stupid.’ And then the girls came up with their own rival chant, so now I participate because sexism is fine as long as it’s an eye for an eye? Right? No. Whatever, anyway… We yell this chant in the dressing room, and because the girls and boys dressing rooms are right next to each other, we like, will have battles between the girls and the guys to see who can be louder, which is usually the guys. And then everyone gets together and we get in a circle, and we pass a pulse around by squeezing each others’ hands in a circle. And we do a big a chant together which is not sexist and is just weird, which is, ‘Everybody, have fun tonight! Everybody, wang chung tonight! And in the honor of Kristin Wendel, let’s kick some ass!’ Kristin Wendel went to my high school several years ago. She was a very quiet girl who yelled, ‘Let’s kick some ass tonight!’ before her last show of her senior year. Anyway, another thing we do is, if you haven’t yet performed in our auditorium, we make you kiss the stage. It’s very low-key hazing, basically.”

This is a tradition that initially creates purposeful rivalry, but it ultimately ends by unifying the students. The chants the cast members yell divides them by gender, and they compete against each other to see who is louder. Furthermore, the nature of the chants is apparently quite sexist. Despite these divisive aspects, my informant says these traditions bring the cast together. They also pump up their energy and get them all excited to perform. They convert all their nervous anxiety into positive exhilaration. Another function of these customs is to remember and pay homage to those who came before them, such as Kristen Wendel. The fact that they repeat these same rituals before every show means that they keep the customs that had been in place for years alive. In this way, they are connecting their past to their present. By teaching these things to younger members of the cast, they also ensure that they are building connections to the future. Each student likely hopes to leave some kind of legacy, and for a few of them, a part of that will be the new variations they make on the pre-show rituals.

 

Ghost Story: Smoking in the Boiler Room

Nationality: Scandinavian
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Omaha, Nebraska
Performance Date: March 28, 2013
Primary Language: English
Language: None

Informant: “Millard North High school in Omaha, Nebraska is haunted with the spirit of a kid who was smoking one day in the boiler room. Now, I didn’t even know we had a boiler room but apparently it’s over by the wood shop. Uh, in that hallway. So, this kid was smoking in the boiler room and um a custodian started to walk down the hallway and frightened the kid uh turned around and tried to run away tripped and stumbled down the stairs, hit is head a few too many times and now when you walk past that hallway or walk into the basement, which again I didn’t really know we had a basement, but you can hear the kid’s raspy voice telling you to beware.”

The informant, a Caucasian male, was born in Spokane,Washington and then moved to Omaha. He is currently a student at USC and studies computer science.

The informant heard the story from someone at his high school. He remembers this story because he feels that “ghost stories are always more fun when they have some sort of significance to you, like you have ties to that school, for example, or if it’s in your home town.” According to the informant, the story is not “too frequently passed around,” and he is not sure if anyone at the school truly believes it, or just repeats the story as a joke.

The informant does not believe in ghosts personally, he thinks the story is kind of silly. In fact, the informant stated, “honestly, I’m not even sure if we have a basement.” The informant said that some kids at the school “fall for all of the ghost stories,” but “in many schools there will be some kids who believe that sort of thing.” The informant referred to one friend in particular who believes in ghosts about whom the informant said “I mess with him a lot and he thinks I am entirely serious.” It is possible that this story is circulated as a joke and to “mess with” students who may believe it, but the informant does not think so.

The informant says that “the moral was no smoking in the basement,” and I agree with the informant. Although the story may be used to jest about the paranormal, it ultimately discusses the illegal consumption of marijuana at a school, and the result is death. The student who broke the law is now forced to haunt the hall and warn other students not to make the same mistake. Like other legends, this tale reflects social fears and concerns about the consequences of consuming illegal drugs, breaking the law, and breaking the law on school property.

Red (a Ghost Story)

Nationality: Chinese
Age: 16
Occupation: High School Student
Residence: Arcadia, CA
Performance Date: 4/28/2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese

“So there’s this ghost story that I heard at Mock Trial state, and… it goes something like… There’s a man who checks into this hotel, and… he’s there alone.  So every night he’s there he goes down to the bar, and while he’s sitting in the bar, having a drink… he observes… up at the counter… he sees the back of this beautiful young woman.  And… he keeps trying to muster up the courage to go talk to her, but as soon as he’s close… uh… she just… goes away.  So he’s keep trying every night and every single night he sees the same beautiful woman and he keeps… trying to bring up the courage to go talk to her.  But she leaves every single time… he’s supposed to go talk to her.
So at night when he retires to his room… he… hears a scratching… at the door.  He wakes up… and he asks, “who’s there?”  But nobody responds.  So… he goes up to the door and looks through the eye hole… and all he can see is red…  There’s nothing there but the color red.  He finds this… kinda odd so he just goes back to sleep.
Uh, when he goes back to the bar he sees the woman again, same chain of events occur… he’s back at his room that night… hears the scratching again.  He looks at the eyehole, asks “who’s there?” No one’s there… it’s JUST the color red.  So the next day… he goes back to the bar… and he sees that the girl is gone.  So he goes up to the bartender and says… “Where’s that girl who sat here every night,  I really wanted to talk to her.  And… the bartender is like… “Oh… um… you mean that young woman?  Well… she left… but there was something really really odd about her.”  And the man asks, “what was that?”  And the bartender says… “Her eyes were colored red.”

My sister heard this story from a friend on a car ride back from a mock trial competition.  She and her friends were sharing scary stories when it was around evening.

My sister was particularly disturbed by this story and claims to think about/dream about it for the remainder of the day and night she hears or re-tells it.  She says that the thing that scares her the most is the connection between the girl’s eye color and the red that the man sees through the eye hole.  The catch is that every night she was here, the girl was peering through the eye hole, watching the man.  She says the thought of being watched in places of supposed privacy frightens her.

When I first heard the story, my first thought aabout the color red was that this either represented a trait of the man or the girl.  I thought that the color would imply something sexual about the story, so I was surprised that the association was quite literal – that the girl’s eyes are red and so when she went to watch the man it covered the eye hole’s view with red.  The story was not as disturbing for me, probably because I was expecting some form of bizarre twist when I had the conversation with the informant, and it was outdoors and fairly light.  The place in which this piece is performed is important. My sister heard this story during the evening in a car – the cramped and dark environment probably contributed to how the story impacted her.  However, I do agree with her on the frightening prospect of being watched without knowing.  I think the element of having the man “watch” the girl without knowing the girl was watching him all along helps emphasize that twist and underlying fear in the audience.

I also noticed that my sister learned this from a high school classmate and was performed in a group of high school students.   I think that the story is scary for high school students because privacy is something adolescents value a lot.  Although adolescents use things such as social networking and are pretty immersed in an environment of disclosure, they also want a certain extent of privacy for their own thoughts.  I feel like high school students like the informant worry about surveillance because they understand how the world they’re growing up in is becoming more and more transparent (partially because of their own practices).

In my opinion, this story shares similarities with other scary stories involving being watched.  The main recurring elements in the story (the girl and the red behind the eye hole) are kept mysterious throughout the entire story – at the end, another character/informant makes the terrifying connection for both the main character and the audience.  But the girl doesn’t really come across as a ghost to me.  She has an unusual characteristic and doesn’t actually speak to the man, but the story itself doesn’t explicitly call her a ghost.  So I find it interesting that my sister calls this a ghost story.