My first meme
It occurs to me that, long before the internet age, I was exposed to the concept of 'meme' on the playground. Songs and stories and drawings and skills that circulated and spread from schoolyard to schoolyard, and also intergenerationally.
Some of the stories we told were the same stories our older brothers and sisters told; and in turn they had perhaps learned them from parents or even grandparents. My own father had a childhood in the great depression, and some of the earliest stories I remember hearing from him were rhymes he'd learned in his own playground days.
Ooey gooey was a worm.
A mighty worm was he.
He sat upon the railroad tracks
The train he did not see.
Ooey gooey!
And this other lovely bit of nature-
A big brown birdie with a bright red bill
Sat upon my windowsill.
I tempted him in with a piece of bread.
And then I squished his ugly head.
Rhymes from my father always seemed to involve some creature meeting a horrible end, perhaps unsurprising from a boy who grew up in Cleveland. From my mother, who grew up in the same era, I learned what the girls had been singing as they jumped Double Dutch in Philadelphia.
Cindarella , dressed in Yealla (yellow)
Went upstairs to kiss a fella
She made a mistake
Kissed a snake
How many times did she make that mistake?
Interestingly, the cadence used for some of the songs I learned from my parents were re-used in songs learned from my schoolmates. One of the songs my father sang during his navy days, for example, during World War II had a verse I remember that went -
Oh the chicken in the Navy,
They say it is the best,
The men get the asshole,
and the admiral gets the rest!
Followed by a chorus of - gee ma I want to go, but they won't let me go home
In the schoolyard it was a condemnation of school days with
Oh I don't want to go to (name of school)
Gee mom, I want to go
but they won't let me go
Gee mom I want to go home.
The tune was the same, though I don't recognize what either stemmed from.
There were urban legends in the schoolyard. Everyone knew someone who had known someone who really really had spiders in their hair, or in their gum. And some famous person really wound up in the hospital to have a gerbil removed from his butt. And if you said Bloody Mary to the mirror seven times, you just might really get killed like this kid's older brother's friend did. They were those circulated unchecked 'facts', and we had no Snopes in those days so it was a very real IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU because everyone knew a guy who knew a guy who...
We also tackled some very controversial subjects for our time and age. In the fairly early 70s, I repeated along with my girlfriends...
I love you
You love me
Homo Sexu Ality
People think
we're just friends
but we're really
les bi ans!
Until our horrified parents told us to stop before someone believes us. We had no idea what they might believe us about but that made the song all the more fun to sing. An older boy taught us that there was another song about homosexuals (which we still had only the vaguest idea of what they might be), sang to the tune of Strangers in the Night
Homos in the night
Exchanging rubbers
This one's too tight
Must be my brothers.
The only rubber things we knew were rubber cement and erasers, so it didn't make much sense. But it made our parents uneasy, so it became a favorite to sing as well. As we got a little older, and made friends who actually were gay or lesbian, I wondered if too much singing the forbidden songs had 'made them that way' the way that parents said a face would stick if you made it too much. It seemed a mysterious condition to me, something that parents obviously disapproved of-- but at the same time didn't really seem that bad in practice. We had a girl friend who had a girlfriend in the fifth grade. It didn't seem any different than the other I Like You Now We Are Dating relationships that went on at that age.
There were rhymes about other taboo subjects - having a baby out of wedlock (Miss Suzy Had a Baby - she definitely wasn't Mrs. ), killing yourself (Suffocation, suffo suffication - a game we used to play), swallowing drain cleaner (Comet - it makes your mouth feel clean), sex organs (milk, milk, lemonade..) , and so on.
And there were Grosser than Gross jokes, which often took a dirty or sexual turn---
What's Grosser than Gross?
A midget saying Gee, Your Hair smells terrific.
One rhyme that we had learned from older brothers and sisters probably dated from the time of race riots and civil unrest -
Fight, Fight
A Nigger and a White
You're the nigger
and I'm the white.
And there was a little bit of domestic violence in
My mother and your mother were hanging out clothes
My mother punched your mother right in the nose
What color was the blood?
that was used to pick who would go next in a game.
When I read about how kids are doing this or that horrible thing on the internets, I don't really think that this generation is any worse than we were as kids. The playground has just become universal, and the memes easier to spread. In an era where playtime is now often highly structured, and based around parent supervised activities - is it any wonder that they are finding their own place to share their version of the meme / rhyme / story?
Childhood is still childhood.
Some of the stories we told were the same stories our older brothers and sisters told; and in turn they had perhaps learned them from parents or even grandparents. My own father had a childhood in the great depression, and some of the earliest stories I remember hearing from him were rhymes he'd learned in his own playground days.
Ooey gooey was a worm.
A mighty worm was he.
He sat upon the railroad tracks
The train he did not see.
Ooey gooey!
And this other lovely bit of nature-
A big brown birdie with a bright red bill
Sat upon my windowsill.
I tempted him in with a piece of bread.
And then I squished his ugly head.
Rhymes from my father always seemed to involve some creature meeting a horrible end, perhaps unsurprising from a boy who grew up in Cleveland. From my mother, who grew up in the same era, I learned what the girls had been singing as they jumped Double Dutch in Philadelphia.
Cindarella , dressed in Yealla (yellow)
Went upstairs to kiss a fella
She made a mistake
Kissed a snake
How many times did she make that mistake?
Interestingly, the cadence used for some of the songs I learned from my parents were re-used in songs learned from my schoolmates. One of the songs my father sang during his navy days, for example, during World War II had a verse I remember that went -
Oh the chicken in the Navy,
They say it is the best,
The men get the asshole,
and the admiral gets the rest!
Followed by a chorus of - gee ma I want to go, but they won't let me go home
In the schoolyard it was a condemnation of school days with
Oh I don't want to go to (name of school)
Gee mom, I want to go
but they won't let me go
Gee mom I want to go home.
The tune was the same, though I don't recognize what either stemmed from.
There were urban legends in the schoolyard. Everyone knew someone who had known someone who really really had spiders in their hair, or in their gum. And some famous person really wound up in the hospital to have a gerbil removed from his butt. And if you said Bloody Mary to the mirror seven times, you just might really get killed like this kid's older brother's friend did. They were those circulated unchecked 'facts', and we had no Snopes in those days so it was a very real IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU because everyone knew a guy who knew a guy who...
We also tackled some very controversial subjects for our time and age. In the fairly early 70s, I repeated along with my girlfriends...
I love you
You love me
Homo Sexu Ality
People think
we're just friends
but we're really
les bi ans!
Until our horrified parents told us to stop before someone believes us. We had no idea what they might believe us about but that made the song all the more fun to sing. An older boy taught us that there was another song about homosexuals (which we still had only the vaguest idea of what they might be), sang to the tune of Strangers in the Night
Homos in the night
Exchanging rubbers
This one's too tight
Must be my brothers.
The only rubber things we knew were rubber cement and erasers, so it didn't make much sense. But it made our parents uneasy, so it became a favorite to sing as well. As we got a little older, and made friends who actually were gay or lesbian, I wondered if too much singing the forbidden songs had 'made them that way' the way that parents said a face would stick if you made it too much. It seemed a mysterious condition to me, something that parents obviously disapproved of-- but at the same time didn't really seem that bad in practice. We had a girl friend who had a girlfriend in the fifth grade. It didn't seem any different than the other I Like You Now We Are Dating relationships that went on at that age.
There were rhymes about other taboo subjects - having a baby out of wedlock (Miss Suzy Had a Baby - she definitely wasn't Mrs. ), killing yourself (Suffocation, suffo suffication - a game we used to play), swallowing drain cleaner (Comet - it makes your mouth feel clean), sex organs (milk, milk, lemonade..) , and so on.
And there were Grosser than Gross jokes, which often took a dirty or sexual turn---
What's Grosser than Gross?
A midget saying Gee, Your Hair smells terrific.
One rhyme that we had learned from older brothers and sisters probably dated from the time of race riots and civil unrest -
Fight, Fight
A Nigger and a White
You're the nigger
and I'm the white.
And there was a little bit of domestic violence in
My mother and your mother were hanging out clothes
My mother punched your mother right in the nose
What color was the blood?
that was used to pick who would go next in a game.
When I read about how kids are doing this or that horrible thing on the internets, I don't really think that this generation is any worse than we were as kids. The playground has just become universal, and the memes easier to spread. In an era where playtime is now often highly structured, and based around parent supervised activities - is it any wonder that they are finding their own place to share their version of the meme / rhyme / story?
Childhood is still childhood.