Title: Hot Pink Nails for Dartmouth Celebration
General Information about Item:
- Customary, Practical Joke
- Language: English
- Country of Origin: United States
- Informant: Kyle Civale
- Date Collected: This data was collected during a one-on-one interview in the library of Dartmouth College with Kyle Civale on October 28th, 2018.
Informant Data:
- Kyle Civale ‘20 is a male student at Dartmouth College. Originally from Manhattan Beach, California, Kyle is film and media studies major and a Theatre minor. Kyle participated in a nature writing and art trip before the start of his Freshman year at Dartmouth during the fall of 2016. He has several older siblings who attended Dartmouth. His older brother was on the same nature walks section as Kyle several years prior to Kyle and had the same prank played on him as well.
Contextual Data:
- Social Context
- Kyle encountered this joke first when he was a tripee during August of 2016 on the nature writing and art trip section and mentioned that this joke is played regularly on students from that section.
- This joke is typically played by upperclassmen or students leading trips on their first year tripees. As the objects of the prank, the new freshmen are supposed to be initiated and bonded together as a new class by going through the embarrassment of this prank together.
- Cultural Context
- This joke occurs on first year trips, which close to 95% of every incoming class at Dartmouth College participates in. Trips are used as a way to welcome each new class to Dartmouth and to break down whatever misconceptions they might have. Accordingly, jokes on trips are used often as they offer a great way to subvert expectations and to make everyone have a good time. Typically, the practical joke is played once the members of the trip and the leaders have left Dartmouth’s campus and are together somewhere in the surrounding wilderness of New Hampshire/Vermont. In this way, practical jokes like this one are very common to the Trips setting as they serve to bring everyone closer together through group humiliation/embarrassment.
Item:
When students from the nature writing and art section embark on their trip each year, trip leaders inform that this is a special year commemorating an anniversary of Dartmouth becoming a coeducational university. Trip leaders have all of the male members of the section paint their finger nails in bright pink, telling them that each other section of trips does the same thing and that there will be a large celebration when all the trips convene at Moosilauke lodge at the end of Trips. However, when the nature writing and art trips section arrives, they are always the only ones to show up with such brightly painted fingernails.
Transcript:
- Jackson: Hey Kyle, I understand you went on trips. Do you think you could tell me a little bit about like your background and what you’re studying here and where you’re from?
- Kyle: Yeah. Sure. So I’m Kyle Civale. I’m a 20 from outside Los Angeles. I’m a major in film and media studies modified with English and a Theatre minor.
- Jackson: And when you think back on your time in trips, was there anything or any pranks that stuck out to you that were especially memorable?
- Kyle: Definitely one that if, I was ever to lead a trip, I’d certainly would do and liked a lot was when our trip leader asked all the men in our group to paint our fingernails pink as a way of showing our support for Dartmouth becoming a coed school. They told us it was the 35-year anniversary of this happening. We were all very excited to do it, and then when we got to the lodge the next day, we were the only trip who had the guy’s in our trip with their nails pink, so yeah interesting.
- Jackson: Thanks!
Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):
Audio file
Informant’s Comments:
- “This was one of those things that sticks out in my mind as a highlight of Trips, just a really fun experience overall where I never knew what to expect.”
- “I’m still best friends with some of these people today.”
Collectors’ Comments:
- By making Kyle’s trip section stand out from the rest when everyone gathered at the Moosilauke Lodge, this prank had an added effect of giving its participants a distinguishing marker that only they shared. Kyle really admired how seriously everyone took this until they got to the Lodge and how the entire focus turned to how silly he and his newfound friends looked afterwards.
- In collecting folklore, I also heard variants of this prank with made up reasons for the celebration, so there seems to be a lot of continuity in making tripees think that their pink nails are part of some broader celebration.
Collector’s Name: Jackson Baur
Tags/Keywords:
- Joke. Pranks. Practical Jokes. Trips. Dartmouth.