Posted
by Misty Nuckolls
April 26, 2007 at 8:33 p.m.
There's WHAT In My Bed?
I was in third grade when I found out what "Ring Around the Rosy" was really about, and I thought it was cool as crap.Bedbugs, though . . .I'd heard the "night night, sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite" thing about a hundred times before the night I couldn't sleep and snuck out to hear my dad, half-drunk on the Beast, bullshitting with his best friend. It was one of the very, very rare occasions when my dad talked about Viet Nam at all. He was bitching about jungle rot, and fleas, and bedbugs. Well, anyway, whenever anyone wished me goodnight with that singsong sentiment again, it screwed up a night's sleep, what with the tossing and the constant itching of imaginary bugs all over my body.When I tuck Penny in, I say, "Night night, sleep tight, don't bet on bedbug fights!!"Much more entertaining imagery to go to sleep to, in my opinion.
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chrysanthalbee (chrys anthalbee) says…
A+ parenting! my daughter (hbomb) sleeps with one of our dogs (ivy) and i usually say to ivy, "don't let hbomb bite you, okay ivy?" ;)
thetomdotdot (anonymous) says…
I tell mine "watch out for the bed bugs", then give em a pinch, make a scary noise, turn the light out, and leave the room cackling with glee at their terrored giggly ass screams.
Bad parenting can be fun.
TheEleventhStephanie (anonymous) says…
What's Ring Around the Rosey about? Dead babies?
dolores2175 (April Fleming) says…
Ring around the Rosy is about the plague, I think.
Bed bugs are miserable to deal with. When my older sister's apartment got infested, she had to put all of her things into black garbage bags and put them outside so the little buggies would get cooked and die. The furniture had to all be destroyed. And even though she put a big sign on her mattress that said "bed bugs! don't take me!" when it went to the curb, naturally, someone took it home.
edie_ (anonymous) says…
ring around the rosey
The Plague caused people to get red festering sores on the skin, surrounded by a ring.
pocket full of posies
People carried flowers in their pockets to pull up to their face to breathe through the stench of rotting flesh and...
ashes ashes
...bodies being burned in a mass grave.
we all fall down.
You get the picture.
edie_ (anonymous) says…
You know, I really can't think of a genre more humorously eerie than old children's songs! Remember the lullaby rock a bye baby, about the practice of hiding babies born out of wedlock in a tree, until they crashed to the ground and died? Good heavens!
lori (anonymous) says…
Go to
http://www.snopes.com/medical/disease...
and click on plague for a discussion of why ring around the rosie is most likely not about the plague.
one of probably hundreds of interpretations for rock a bye baby: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock-a-b...
But for your enjoyment of grim and dark children's tales, let's hope (but not hold our breath) that they do Edward Gorey's work some justice:
http://movies.yahoo.com/mv/news/va/20...
KU's German department used to do a class on Fairy Tales. I'd only ever read the mainstream fairy tales, and even those were disney-fied. I didn't realize that, for example, the food that Rapunzel's mother craved was an herb that was considered an aphrodisiac at the time (who knew parsley was so powerful?). But my favorites were the ones that weren't popular. Like the one where a woman is in a cemetery crying and lamenting the death of her two young sons, and an angel comes and gives her a dream of the future, and how her one son would have grown up to be a murderer and her other son would have also been a common criminal who caused harm and heartbreak to his family and community. She woke up happy and thanking god for taking her sons before they could become evil. How creepy!