Tag Archives: stories

Something Embarrassing

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General Information about Item:

  • Traditions
  • Language: English
  • Country of Origin: USA
  • Informant: MS
  • Date Collected: 11/6

Informant Data:

  • MS is a ‘22 from Florida on the Track & Field team. He has been on the team all 4 years and participates in the hammer and weight throw events.

Contextual Data:

  • Cultural Context: Sports teams are known to have events where the coaches aren’t present to increase team bonding. Without the coaches present, it can lead to the team feeling more connected as students and athletes.
  • Social Context: Speaking in front of a crowd is, for some people, one of the most difficult tasks one can be asked to do. This situation could be amplified by the story being an embarrassing one. 

Item:

  • The night before the Ivy League Championship, the Track & Field team gathers together and have the first-time HEPs athletes tell an embarrassing story in front of the entire team. The coaches aren’t present, and everyone tells something pretty personal.

Associated Audio File:

Informant’s Comments:

  • This tradition can be difficult for people who are afraid of public speaking, but towards the end everyone is laughing and having a great time. This event truly helped make me feel a part of the team.

Collector’s Comments:

  • I have never been afraid of public speaking, but I think having to tell one of my most embarrassing stories in front of a group of people I respect and admire would be difficult. However, it seems that this tradition does incredible things for team spirit, and I’d be curious to see if it works for groups other than sports teams. 

Collector’s Name:

  • Jonah Kahl

The Jelly Bean Game

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Title: The Jelly Bean Game

General Information about Item:

  • Customary Folklore: Game
  • Language: English
  • Country: United States

Informant Data:

  • The informant is a Dartmouth ’21 female. She went on a first-year trip in September 2017; the trip was hiking (level 3).

Contextual Data:

  • Social Context
    • All the trippees sitting around a circle together while taking a break from physical activities
  • Cultural Context
    • Provides a way for the trippees to share things about themselves with the group to get to know each other — common to play games to get to know one another in American culture.

Item:

  • The Jelly Bean game: each jelly bean color corresponds to a different category of story. Each person then picks a jelly bean and tells a story corresponding to that color of jelly bean.

Transcript of Informant Interview:

“We only played the jelly bean game one time. We sat around at a rest stop and there were six different colors of jelly beans in this gigantic bag and we labeled each color a different category. So purple might have been like a horror story or a scary story and pink might have been like a story from your childhood and red is an embarrassing story. And then person by person, someone reaches in and randomly picks a color of jelly bean out of the bag. So the person would then tell a story based on the color of jelly bean that they picked.”

Informant’s Comments:

  • It was a really fun game, and a cool way to learn interesting things about the other people on my trip.

Collector’s Comments:

  • Informant was able to give a detailed account of the experience that he had on trips.

Collector’s Name: Madison DeRose

Tags/Keywords:

  • Customary Folklore, Game, Jelly Bean, Stories, Bonding

Story 1: “Following Instructions”

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“Following Instructions”

Informant Information: 

Terry has a son who has Down Syndrome. He is twenty years old, and has been a member of the “My Own Voice” choir for several years now, and still participates. “My Own Voice” is a choir for children with special needs in Andover, Massachusetts.

Type of Lore: Not Applicable

Language: English

Country of Origin: United States of America

Social/Cultural Context: Little stories such as these are shared often throughout the community, similar to how parents share mishaps regarding their typical children as well. These are often given as cautionary tales.

Informant Comments: 

Dear Angelina,

So nice to hear from you!  We were in the process of packing up to move when we received your email telling us about the project you are working on.  We have been in our new home just over one week and this is the first time I am opening and responding to them.  

What a fun project!  So, Brian and I were just talking about how Joshua has viewed or understood a particular thing and we recalled a time when:

[He] was, maybe, 10 years old, and he had his first Gameboy and was playing Ratatouille.  He was mixing together all the ingredients for the recipe needed for the game and putting it into a baking pan.  Well, next, it needed to be “cooked”. The Gameboy, along with the game of Ratatouille, recipe ready, was placed into the microwave and turned on for cooking!  How could we feel anything except, grateful that the only things that did not survive were the Gameboy and the microwave, and compassion for [our son], and a greater “SENSE” of humor.

Life can be taken too seriously.

We hope you will enjoy this little story.

Collector’s Comments: 

While this story is entertaining, we have determined that it is not folklore. This is a story about an individual child told by his mother. What is significant in the characteristic of this particular story, though, is how it all hinges on this child’s interpretation of instructions literally, which is a view of the world that many, many people with special needs share.

Tags/Keywords: Literal, Stories, Children, Special Needs, Down Syndrome