Children’s Folklore Recent Titles in Greenwood Folklore Handbooks Myth: a handbook

O-R-A-N-G-E
Serena: Cabbage patch, cabbage patch in a dish,
What color hair do you wish?
And say Dori said ‘orange,’ then you’d go O-R-A-N-G-E spells orange.
Dori: My mother and your mother live across the street
1918 Alligator Street
And every night they have a fight and this is what they say:
Boys are rotten, made out of cotton,
Girls are sexy, made out of Pepsi.
With a cherry, cherry dish rag on your big fat toe, and that means you’re
not IT.
Serena and Dori, both eight years old, recited these two rhymes in Bingham-
ton, New York, in April 1987. Both rhymes have circulated actively in oral 
tradition. The first, which more commonly begins with the line “Bubble gum, 
bubble gum in a dish,” can be traced back to 1927; the second, which often 
takes the form of a clapping game, can be traced back to 1888 (Abrahams and 
Rankin 28, 154; Bronner 53). Humorous lines distinguishing boys from girls 
were very popular in the 1980s and 1990s, reflecting girls’ awareness of chang-
ing gender roles
Ip Dip Do
Ip dip do,
Cat’s got flu,
Dog’s got chicken-pox
Out goes you
Joanne Green and J.D.A. Widdowson include this counting-out rhyme in their 
Traditional English Language Genres: Continuity and Change, 1950–2000 
(367). 

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Examples and Texts 57
The two most popular counting-out rhymes in their data sample are One Potato, 
Two Potato and Ip Dip Do. A variant of Ip Dip Do appeared in the summer of 
1953, when Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in England: “Red, white, and blue, / 
The Queen’s got the flu, / The King’s got the tummy ache / And don’t know what 
to do” (Opie and Opie, 
Lore and Language
106).
Handclapping Rhymes
Apples on a Stick
Zing, zing, zing
Apples on a stick makes me sick
Makes my stomach go two forty-six
Not because it’s dirty, not because it’s clean,
Just because I kissed a boy behind the magazine.
Hey, kids, you wanna have a fight?
Here comes Wade, and Arron in sight.
They can wiggle and wobble and do the splits,
But most of all they can kiss, kiss, kiss.
Randall Hansen collected this rhyme from six-year-old Nate Hansen, who played 
clapping games in kindergarten at Santa Clara Elementary School in Utah in the 
summer of 1982. Roger D. Abrahams cites a 1948 version of this rhyme from 
West Virginia in 
Jump-Rope Rhymes: A Dictionary
(11). Irene Chagall notes in 
her essay “Let’s Get Rhythm” (2005– 06) that the rhyme’s opening lines “meta-
phorically refer to sexual intercourse” (46). See also Barbara Michaels and Bettye 
Whyte’s 
Apples on a Stick: Th
e Folklore of Black Children
(1983).