Shivaree - 4 Nov. 2009

Welcome to another minicast from A Way with Words. I'm Martha Barnette. <br/><br/>You may remember the call we had from Tony in Encinitas, California. He was curious about the term for an unusual hazing ritual:<br/><br/>My dad woke us up one night, about 8 o'clock. He said don't be alarmed. There's going to be gunfire and a lot of noise, and there's going to be a lot of people in the house and there's going to be a party. This is probably late spring. And lo and behold, next thing we knew there were trucks driving up and women coming in with food and we heard people shooting off guns and men doing what men do. It was a giant party. And I said, 'Daddy what is this?' He said, 'It's a shivaree.' <br/><br/>Well, it turns out that shivarees aren't that unusual after all. Or at least, a lot of you have had experiences with these raucous surprise parties for newlyweds.<br/><br/>Amanda from Livingston, Montana says that shivarees were quite common when she was growing up in rural western South Dakota in 1960's and 70's.<br/><br/>'They usually took place long enough after the wedding that the happy couple had let down their guard,' she writes. 'The revelers would turn up late in the evening in a noisy caravan and take over the house, rousing the hosts out of bed. Good-natured chaos ensued; shortsheeting beds, sprinkling cornflakes in the beds, and tearing the labels off the canned goods in the cupboards while the hosts were distracted by entertaining the crowd. It was a fun, harmless way to welcome the new couple into the community of adults.' <br/><br/>Guess that's one way to do it.<br/><br/>We got another email from John. He's a dairy farmer in Eleva, Wisconsin. <br/><br/>At the age of 40, John took his sweetheart took a trip to Colorado. While there, they ended up getting married. <br/><br/>'Upon our return,' he writes, 'as news of our marriage leaked out, the farming community felt that they were deprived of a party. And thus plans for a shivaree were hatched.<br/><br/>'It happened in the early evening, after the milk