Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends (18 page)

They had to have help from the attendant who cut them loose, and he had to pay for a new dress.

Reported by Carsten Bregenhøj in
FOAFtale News
(newsletter of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research), no. 24, December 1991. A similar version from Belgium was reported in a 1990 article in
Fabula,
(a journal of folktale studies). American versions of the legend usually involve an unzipped man on a bus—as in the May 10, 1991, Ann Landers column—or an unzipped man dining in an expensive restaurant. In the latter versions he snags the edge of the tablecloth in his fly and pulls the whole cloth and all the dishes to the floor when he rises from the table. In one of the few folkloristic studies of such stories, “The Most Embarrassing Thing that Ever Happened: Conversational Stories in a Theory of Enactment,”
Folklore Forum,
vol. 10, no. 3 (1977), Roger D. Abrahams relates a restaurant version of the legend as a personal experience. Later in the essay, however, he admits that it actually happened not to him but to “a couple of friends of mine exactly as recounted,
or so it was reported to me”
(my emphasis). Finally, there are some extremely elaborated versions of the story that include several further embarrassing incidents taking place in the restaurant; when the young man apologizes for the disturbance, the headwaiter invites him to “Come back anytime. You’re worth it in entertainment value.”

“The Golf Bag”

A
golfer was having a terrible round, hitting ball after ball far out into the woods or straight into sand traps or water hazards. Finally at the eighteenth hole, after plunking three more shots into a pond, the disgusted player flung his whole bag of clubs into the pond and strode out to the parking lot, vowing never to play this stupid game again.

Five minutes later, watched by the same group in the clubhouse bar who had seen the earlier scene, the golfer returned. He borrowed a rake from a groundskeeper and fished out his golf bag, then sheepishly got his car keys out of a zippered pocket, flung the golf bag back into the water, and walked back to the parking lot.

Told around numerous golf clubhouses as a true local occurrence, although—to my knowledge—it has never been verified by eyewitnesses. In a 1990 newspaper column the story was told about Indiana University’s volatile basketball coach, Bobby Knight. The story resembles much fictional golf humor that circulates in the form of anecdotes and cartoons.

“The Unlucky Contacts”

E
very spring Tom Dodds, a contributing editor of
Family Safety & Health
magazine, published by the National Safety Council, compiles a list of what he calls “Freak Squeaks”—accidents with a humorous twist.

Several readers of my column sent me Dodds’s 1987 list, published in the spring issue. I enjoyed the collection, as I always do, but two “squeaks” described in the article seem to be urban legends.

One is a variation of “Cruise Control,” included in Chapter 14. The other suspicious story deals with another fairly recent innovation—contact lenses. Dodds tells the story like this:

“When the DePaul University basketball team went on the road to play Dayton, forward Kevin Golden and guard Andy Laux were paired as roommates. Before Golden hit the sack, he put his contact lenses in a glass of water next to his bed. Laux woke up thirsty, grabbed the water, and guzzled down his roommate’s contacts in one mighty gulp.”

I have heard several versions of the swallowed-contacts story, generally attributed to some anonymous friend of a friend. And in a 1985 column attacking the vanity of contact wearers, columnist Mike Royko wrote, “We’ve all heard the stories about people who awake thirsty during the night and, in reaching for a glass of water on the nightstand, accidentally drink their contact lenses.”

A common variation of the swallowed-contacts story has a clever and provocative angle. In this version, a prominent man or woman is engaged in an illicit affair. He swallows his mistress’s contacts, and the accident leads to their misbehavior becoming known to the public.

In 1982, Diana McLellan reported such an accident in her
Washington Post
gossip column “Ear,” saying that it happened to an unnamed Midwestern congressman and his secret lover.

The congressman, she wrote, “gratefully gulped the glass of water his charmer had thoughtfully placed beside the bed.” The glass contained her contacts, which he swallowed unawares, and he only learned of it when she called him at the office the next day.

From my syndicated newspaper column for release the week of October 28, 1987. It seems to me that people who wear contacts do not usually park them overnight, like a set of false teeth, in a water glass on the nightstand, since usually the right and left lenses must be stored separately. Nor would most people, in my opinion, pick up a half-full glass of tepid water and drink it. Still, since this column was published, readers have continued to send me “true” accounts of swallowed contacts.

“The Wrong Teeth”

A
husband and wife were taken to the Gold Coast [of Australia] for the day by friends. Relationships had been strained between them for some time, and the friends hoped that by taking them out for a carefree day together, they might salvage their relationship. However, the husband made many sour remarks about his wife.

The party went surfing. The wife was overtaken by a wave and dumped, and when she splutteringly broke surface she gasped and confessed that in her panic she had opened her mouth and lost her false teeth. Husband sneered, then, when her back was turned, slipped his false teeth from his jaw and pretended to retrieve them from the sand. His wife washed them hastily in the sea, and slipped them into her mouth. Then she took them out with an exclamation of disgust and hurled them seaward, remarking, “Those aren’t mine. Somebody else must have lost them!”

Titled “The Teeth of the Evidence,” in W. N. Scott’s 1985 book,
The Long & The Short & The Tall: A Collection of Australian Yarns,
pp. 235–36. A different version of the yarn is included in Scott’s 1976
Complete Book of Australian Folklore.
A parallel story is found in the Netherlands, as documented in “The False Teeth in the Cod,” a paper by Dutch folklorists Eric Venbrux and Theo Meder.

“Bungling Brides”

F
or years our rabbi has used his own version of the story you call “The Bungling Bride” to make a point about the necessity of understanding the reasons behind the performance of religious rituals. Rabbi Robert Schreibman of Temple Jeremiah in Northfield, Illinois, tells the story like this:

A wife always prepared the roast for holiday meals by cutting it in two and roasting each half in a separate pan. When her husband asked why she did it this way, she said that her mother had always done it that way and she was just following her practice.

When they asked her mother why she cut the roast in half, she said it was because
her
mother had always done it that way.

So they asked grandmother, and she said it was because she never had a pan large enough to hold a roast that would feed the whole family at a holiday dinner, so she was forced to cut the roast in half.

Ours is a Reform Jewish congregation, and Rabbi Schreibman uses this story to point out the need to understand why a certain ritual is done, and to perform it because of knowledge and understanding rather than as mere rote repetition of a no-longer meaningful activity.

The rabbi and I thought you would enjoy learning how an urban legend is told for a special religious purpose.

Sent to me by Victoria S. Weisenberg, and quoted in my newspaper column for the week of May 20, 1991. This use of a legend parallels what I told students in folklore courses—to remember the message of the opening number in the musical
Fiddler on the Roof.
In that song, Tevye explains why people in his village have done certain things for generations. “Tradition! Tradition!” he sings. Tradition is the essence of folklore, and teaching via storytelling is an essential part of Jewish, as well as most other religious, traditions. Another way I heard “The Bungling Bride,” the woman was cutting a ham in two, but that version wouldn’t be told by a rabbi. In yet another variation, the man sees his bride removing the drumsticks from a turkey before roasting it. She says that’s how her mother told her to prepare a turkey. But her mother explains that she needed to do that simply because she never had an oven large enough to fit a whole turkey inside with its legs sticking up.

I’ve also heard about a bride who fastened little cotton balls to the screen door with hairpins. Her husband was puzzled, and asked her why she did this. “That keeps flies out of the house,” she answered, but she was unable to explain how this worked. She said her mother had taught her that little trick. So the husband asked his mother-in-law about the cotton balls, and she explained that she always used the cotton from pill and vitamin bottles to plug up holes in her screen door. She said it worked well to keep flies out of the house.

My favorite story about a meaningless ritual is one I call “The Holy Place.” I heard it from a man in Indiana:

“The Nude Bachelor”

I
n a 1987 release, Jim Davis, creator of the popular “Garfield” comic strip, retold a classic urban legend in seven graphic panels and a few well-chosen words. By such means urban legends sometimes gain an assist from the mass media and again pass by word of mouth with renewed vigor.

In the first panel of Davis’s Sunday strip for March 15th, the feisty feline Garfield gives his owner Jon a sharp “SMACK” for using up all the hot water during his shower. The next five panels depict the cat’s revenge: He waits until Jon has stepped out the front door, wrapped only in a towel, to pick up the morning paper, and then he gives the door a quick “SLAM!” stranding Jon outside. In the last panel two neighbors comment on the disgusting scene of the bachelor caught outside in the nude.

“The Nude Bachelor” has been told for years as one of the most popular “caught-with-your-pants-down” urban legends. It usually is said to have happened to a friend of a friend. But the very widespread telling of this story is a virtual guarantee that it didn’t really happen to anyone even remotely connected with the storytellers.

“I honestly had never heard the story before,” said Davis, when asked about the origin of this particular strip. If he’s right, it may be that the gag is such a good one that, inevitably, any number of people think it up independently. Or it is possible that Davis heard some version of the story, forgot about it, but then dredged it up in a new form during the creative process.