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:
Members of a Catholic congregation always knelt and crossed themselves at a certain point in one of the church aisles. However, nobody knew why that particular spot was especially sacred, so someone asked one of the older members of the church to explain.
After some thought, the member recalled the reason. There had once been something projecting from the wall at just that spot, and anybody walking by had to duck to get past. After the obstacle was removed, the people kept on ducking out of habit, and eventually, this evolved into the act of genuflecting at that point.
“The Nude Bachelor”
In 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.
The newspaper is a key element in most versions of the story. Often the sound of the paper hitting the porch is what causes the nude man to peek outside. Then usually he gets stuck out there when the door accidentally slams shut, and so he has only the paper to cover his nudity.
“The Nude Bachelor” is popular in eastern Europe. Hungarian-American folklorist Linda Dégh reported hearing it in Budapest in 1960. A version of it also occurred in the 1961 Russian novel Twelve Chairs. This, in turn, was depicted in the 1970 Mel Brooks film based on the novel, so another media treatment of the legend may have aided its oral circulation here.
I heard the story told twice in Romania some years ago. Once it was supposed to have happened to a man staying in his girlfriend’s apartment who woke up nude just as the mail arrived, and stepped out to reach the box. In the second Romanian version the nude man was reaching across the hall to drop some trash down the building’s garbage chute when his apartment door closed behind him.
Sometimes the victim of the misadventure may attempt to climb a tree and re-enter through a bathroom window, but he drops his towel as he climbs, and he is apprehended by the police, who were called by nervous neighbors who had looked out and seen a nude man in a tree looking into the bathroom window of the house next door.
Part of my newspaper column for release the week of April 20, 1987. In a later column I reported on several people who had written me describing similar experiences of their own when they were stranded outside in the nude or nearly so. In the entry for December 16, 1960, in John Kenneth Galbraith’s 1969 book, Ambassador’s Journal, the then “aspiring diplomat” suffered a similar nude escapade. Attempting to return an item left in his room by a visitor who was still waiting for the elevator to arrive, Galbraith, who had undressed for a shower, suddenly found himself “inelegantly and utterly naked in the hall of a sizable hotel.” He borrowed the visitor’s coat to wear as he went in search of a pass key.
“Come and Get It!”
My mother used to tell a story about two or three young, recently married couples who were sharing a cottage. One of the wives, having prepared dinner, found that a man she thought was her husband was still in the shower. So she reached through the curtain, gave his penis a yank, and said “Ding-dong, supper’s ready.” Later she discovered that her own husband was not in the shower.
My mother, unfortunately, has died, and her sister does not remember the story. My brother does, however—and although neither of us can remember the names she gave the couples, we do agree that they were named as she told the story. My guess is that the story—legend or not—was current in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the late ’30s or very early ’40s, when (and where) my mother was in high school.
I kept practising it [a difficult phrase in a Mozart opera duet] to myself over and over again until my room-mate, the tenor Murray Dickie, who was singing Pedrillo in Die Entführung aus dem Serail, eventually screamed at me: “If you sing that damned thing once more you’ll drive me mad.” And for years afterwards he would greet me with that phrase whenever we met, while I in my turn would call out to him: “Ding-Dong! Time for tea.” This stemmed from an incident at his London home when friends were visiting for a performance of The Marriage of Figaro at Covent Garden in which Murray and I were singing. Going to call her husband from his bath, Anne Dickie saw him stooping over, as she thought, to retrieve something from the floor, still naked. Reaching one hand between his legs she called gaily, “Ding-dong! Time for tea!” and went into their bedroom. There she was
confronted by her husband dressing and realised what an embarrassing surprise their visitor must have had.
The first version was sent to me in 1989 by Professor Jonathan Wylie of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The second is from the 1984 autobiography of singer Sir Geraint Evans, titled Sir Geraint Evans: A Knight at the Opera, pp. 70–71. Evans and Dickie had appeared together in The Marriage of Figaro at Covent Garden the year before, when the “Ding-dong” incident presumably occurred. The English folklorist Paul Smith, in his 1986 The Book of Nastier Legends, gives a version in which a sergeant invites a fellow NCO home for the weekend. The punch line is “Ding-dong. Tea’s ready darling,” and a cartoon illustration is captioned “They’re not my Sergeant’s privates!” Gershon Legman, the great chronicler of sexual folklore, reported “The “The Stranger in the Shower” told as a true story in 1940, and I heard variations with a “Come and get it!” punch line from the 1970s and later. Although the story is similar to “The Unzipped Plumber (or Mechanic),” the two legends seem to have different histories and distributions.
“A License to Practice”
A couple from, say, Minneapolis (or another American city) were touring France. They were staying in an expensive hotel in Paris, and one morning shortly before their return home, they decided to go their separate ways for half a day.
The husband wanted to go sightseeing, while the wife had a bit more shopping to finish. They agreed to meet again around noon in front of the hotel.
The wife arrived back first, and while waiting for her husband she paced back and forth in front of the hotel or in the lobby.
Some passing gendarmes noticed the woman and said something to her that she did not understand. They were just writing her out a ticket when her husband arrived and added his voice to her strong protests that she had done nothing amiss.
The Americans were both taken to the police station, where the wife was booked for soliciting sex in a public place. Although the couple explained what was going on, the police insisted that to correct the mistake would take more time than the Americans had left in Paris, so it would be simpler if the woman would just buy a license to practice prostitution.
They did so, and now have the license framed in their home in Minneapolis.
There are countless other versions of this story, some set in Mexico, where the woman is wearing a red, white, and blue outfit and is arrested as a prostitute because, supposedly, only prostitutes wear red shoes there. Sometimes the travelers in Mexico are two women who go into a small cantina but are soon asked to leave. It turns out that there is a $100 fine for a woman to be there unless she has a yellow card identifying her as a licensed prostitute. The card costs only $2, so the women each buy one and now, of course, they proudly display their professional cards at home. I’ve heard that some French and Mexican shops sell such documents to tourists as souvenirs, although I’ve never seen one. In Utah the innocent American ladies are sometimes said to be a Mormon Relief Society president and her two counselors, who live near the Mexican border and cross it one day to attend a bazaar. They part for a while and agree to meet later at a certain corner. Taken in by the police and told they are being arrested for prostitution without a license, the Mormon women call their stake president for advice. He tells them to buy a license, since it’s cheaper than the fine, then to get out of Mexico and stay out. How far back does this legend go? One reader told me he had heard this story in the early 1960s, but Henry D. Spalding, compiler of several collections of ethnic humor, wrote me in 1987 saying that he had heard the story in the late 1920s.
“The Witness’s Note”
In the locker room of the Los Angeles Athletic Club recently two young deputy city attorneys, sweat-stained from the handball court, were discussing current trials.
“Did you hear,” the winner of the game asked, “about that rape case in Van Nuys? I dropped in to see how a friend of mine was handling the prosecution.
“The victim was testifying. My friend asked her what the defendant had said when he broke into her apartment. She said ‘I want to…I want…’ and then said she just couldn’t repeat it out loud. So the judge had her write it down on a slip of paper.
“The attorneys and the judge looked at it, and the bailiff passed it to the jury. Each juror read it and passed it along. It was after lunch, and kind of warm, and the last guy in the back row was dozing.
“The woman juror sitting next to him nudged him and handed him the note. He woke up and read it, looked at the note again, broke into a big smile, and tucked it into his coat pocket.”
The second attorney, loser at handball, showed no mercy. “Then how come,” he asked, “I heard about the same thing happening in Long Beach Superior Court three years ago?”
“Really?” the first man said. “Could it have happened twice?”
From an early article on the UL genre, Dial Torgerson’s “Twice Told. The American Legends—They Refuse to Die” in the Los Angeles Times, January 6, 1974. A reader from Berkeley wrote me saying that he heard the same story from a coworker in San Francisco in 1973. Stephen Pile included “The Witness’s Note” as a British occurrence among his “Stories We Failed to Pin Down” in his 1979 The Incomplete Book of Failures, while W. N. Scott included an Australian version dated 1980 in his 1985 book The Long & The Short & The Tall. In 1988 the story was used in an episode of the TV series L.A. Law. Beyond these published versions, the story is frequently told, both as a joke and a legend. Often the awakened juror comments, “Judge, this note is a private matter between this lady and myself.”
“The Blind Date”
May 1, 1994
Dear Ann Landers: I met a young woman at college who has it all—looks, brains and personality. I finally got up enough nerve to ask her out, and she accepted.
After we had been dating for a few months, it became apparent that she was beginning to feel as strongly about me as I felt about her, so we made plans to go on our first out-of-town (overnight) trip together—a drive to San Diego for a three-day weekend.
Although I didn’t know for sure that anything was going to happen, I thought I’d better be prepared, so I stopped by a drugstore on the way home from school to buy some condoms. I had never bought condoms before (I usually got them from friends), so I was a little ill at ease. I tried to make small talk with the pharmacist as he rang up my purchase and foolishly blurted out that I might “get lucky” over the weekend.
When I went to pick up my girlfriend the next morning, imagine my shock when that pharmacist answered the door. He was her father. I was so embarrassed I couldn’t speak. Fortunately, my girlfriend was ready on time, and we managed to leave after a brief introduction.
We had a lovely weekend, but I didn’t tell her that I had bought the condoms from her father. I now am feeling guilty and uneasy. Should I say something and get it over with or keep quiet?
—Van Nuys, Calif.
Dear V.N.: Keep quiet. It’s enough that YOU are embarrassed. Why make your girlfriend uncomfortable too?
There are times when the less said, the better, and this happens to be one of those times.
May 1, 1994
Dear Ann Landers: The story in today’s column about the guy buying condoms from a pharmacist who turns out to be his date’s father is an old urban legend…. Many readers have written me about this story, several of them pointing out that it also appeared in a 1972 underground comic book as one of the adventures of the “Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.” I think the reader from Van Nuys, California, who sent it to you either read it in my book, saw the comic book, or simply heard the story in oral tradition….
Best wishes from a faithful reader,
—Jan Harold Brunvand
May 16, 1994
Dear Jan H. Brunvand: Sorry to be so late in responding to your letter of May 1, but I just returned from a cruise and am catching up with the mail that accumulated in my absence.
I am really embarrassed by the fact that I’ve been had. Dozens of rea
ders have written to tell me the condom letter was a gag. I am amazed that no one in my Chicago office or my California syndicate caught it.
I’m signing myself,
Red-Faced in Chicago,
Ann Landers
This story made more sense when told decades ago, before condoms were openly displayed in grocery stores, drugstores, convenience stores, and the like. More recent versions describe a young woman either being fitted for a diaphragm or buying a pregnancy-test kit from a doctor or a pharmacist who turns out to be her boyfriend’s mother or father. Along a similar line, Joe and Teresa Graedon in their syndicated “People’s Pharmacy” column for January 29, 1995, tell the story of a young man who returned to the drugstore where he had purchased his high-tech metal Wham-O slingshot to buy a new rubber sling. When he told a young girl at the pharmacy counter that he needed “a rubber for his Wham-O,” she “turned bright red and suddenly turned to some urgent business in the back of the store, leaving him standing there.”
“Buying Tampax”
I have heard this one so many times that I’ve stopped counting. I’ve heard it from actual grocery store clerks, both in Arizona and Florida, who swear they’ve heard it live!
A beautiful woman went shopping in a grocery store. After reaching the check-out counter, the clerk, also female, asked her, “Will there be anything else, Ma’am?”
“Well, yes, there is,” the shopper replied. “I looked for a box of Tampax on the shelves, but I couldn’t find it.”
Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends Page 15