Date Collected
Winter 11-2-2018
Informant
Dawnetta Mahnken
Point of Discovery/Informant Bio
Dawnetta Mahnken is my mother. She is 42 years old, and has a wicked sense of humor when given the opportunity to show it. She loves to unexpectedly tease her children, joke around, play with us, and have fun, even though she usually is the one who does a lot of the household chores and encourages her children to do the same (under threat of suspended activities, of course). She is a very organized person who loves to read (or listen to audio books), garden, and help her family. She is a wonderful mother, despite having a very hard childhood- I won’t go into detail. Suffice it to say that I am amazed and grateful that she turned into the person she is today. Before she was a mother and had her own family, she had many more opportunities to enact pranks and jokes, and often took advantage of these with gusto.
Context
I was visiting my parents’ home for Sunday dinner, and after the meal I was chatting with my mom on a comfy couch. We were relaxed and full, enjoying each other’s company. As she asked me about recent life, I shared some stress about the collection project and other finals coming up, telling her that I was planning on just collecting some pranks to get the last few bits of folklore I needed. (This was a set-up: my mother was the one I had been planning on asking in the first place.) She told me that she had some pranks, allowed me to pull out my phone to record, then eagerly shared some of her favorite pranks she has pulled.
Text
So, um… some of our college pranks that we used to do. One that wasn’t quite so nice, um…. and that, uh, I think that we still liked the guys that lived in this apartment? But maybe they ticked us off or something. But we… [pause] we opened up a can of tuna fish, and we found some place in their apartment, I think we ended up taking off an air vent and putting it on the inside the air vent and then screwing it back on. And then like, we’d still like, you know go through the rest of the week and still be chatting with them and they’d be like, “Man, so-and-so really needs to clean his room!” and like we’d just kind of smile, and- [pauses, laughing.] And by the end of the week they were just like, “We think a MOUSE died in the WALL!” [Another laughing pause.] And it was like, SO bad, I can’t even remember what we did to like… make it better… But I think we finally confessed to them and told them where it was.
Texture
So, um… some of our college pranks that we used to do. One that wasn’t quite so nice, um…. and that, uh, I think that we still liked the guys that lived in this apartment? But maybe they ticked us off or something. But we… [pause] we opened up a can of tuna fish, and we found some place in their apartment, I think we ended up taking off an air vent and putting it on the inside the air vent and then screwing it back on. And then like, we’d still like, you know go through the rest of the week and still be chatting with them and they’d be like, “Man, so-and-so really needs to clean his room!” and like we’d just kind of smile, and- [pauses, laughing.] And by the end of the week they were just like, “We think a MOUSE died in the WALL!” [Another laughing pause.] And it was like, SO bad, I can’t even remember what we did to like… make it better… But I think we finally confessed to them and told them where it was.
Instructor
Lynne McNeil
Semester and year
Summer 2018
Theme
G6: Pranks
EAD Number
6.1.21
Recommended Citation
Ledyard, Rayna, "Up To Something Fishy" (2018). USU Student Folklore Fieldwork. Paper 522.
https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/student_folklore_all/522