Dear Ann Landers: I greatly enjoyed the column about the housewife who did her housework in the nude. Perhaps you will get a laugh out of this story, which may or may not be true.
A woman picked a very warm day to begin her spring housecleaning. After an hour or two she thought, “This heat is unbearable. I can’t stand these clothes another minute.” She promptly took every stitch off and happily continued with her housework. Then the doorbell rang.
“Wouldn’t you know it,” she said to herself, and tiptoed to the window. She peered through the curtains and saw a man standing at the front door. The woman called out, “Who is it?”
“Blind man,” was the reply.
“Are you sure,” she shouted back.
“Of course I’m sure,” was the answer.
“Since he’s blind,” she thought, “it won’t make any difference.” She ran down the stairs with a dollar bill in her hand, flung open the door and handed it to him. The man looked surprised, took the dollar bill and asked “OK, lady, where do you want me to hang these blinds?”
—P. T. Paducah, Ky.
From Ann Landers’s column of August 10, 1986. She printed a shorter version sent by a reader, but not credited to a specific source, in her column of October 13, 1998. Again, it was prefaced by a reference to “The Nude Housewife.” In a newspaper column of my own I traced this story back to the early 1970s, but readers quickly informed me that they had heard it in the 1950s when “Venetian blinds” were specifically mentioned. It was also a favorite joke told by Henny Youngman and other professional comedians. Probably “The Blind Man” would have fit just as neatly under “Jumping to Conclusions,” or “Slapstick Comedy,” but I placed it here because of the mistaken identity involved, plus the donated dollar, which reminds me of the measly tip given to the black celebrity in some of the “Black and White” stories.
22
Campus Capers
College and university life is full of folklore. You might not expect this, remembering that our Institutions of Higher Learning are devoted to Searching for Truth, Pushing the Frontiers of Knowledge, Preserving our Cultural Heritage, Educating the Cream of the Academic Crop, etc., etc., etc. (My computer automatically capitalizes all that kind of stuff, but leaves what I write about fraternities, food fights, or football games in plain lower case.) Maybe it’s in part the dignity and aloofness of the academic tradition—symbolized best by the preservation of our anachronistic graduation ceremonies—that leads campus folk to respond at times with goofy customs, slang, parodies, superstitions, mock rituals, and—yes—even urban legends centered on campus capers.
The broad topic of academic folklore could fill volumes; in fact, it has already filled one remarkable collection entitled Piled Higher and Deeper, published in 1990 by folklorist Simon J. Bronner. (The title refers to a joke about the meaning of the degree abbreviation Ph.D.) Another scholar who has studied academic lore, Professor Barre Toelken, suggests that students, although obviously literate, when they interact as a folk group on campus could be called “communally aliterate.” What Toelken means is that when students have something of immediate concern to communicate, they tend to do so by word of mouth and customary example rather than in writing. Out of that principle emerges a rich vein of academic folklore.
Take the recurring problem of what to do if an instructor fails to show up for class on time. Torn by their outrage at being stood up and their fear of being marked absent if the teacher does eventually arrive, students typically rely on the rule of “The Obligatory Wait” to settle their dilemma. This “rule,” which is not to be found in any campus source of official regulations, supposedly holds that students in a class are expected to wait a specified number of minutes, depending upon the rank of the teacher. A typical formula is five minutes for an instructor, ten for an assistant professor, fifteen for an associate professor, and twenty minutes for a full professor. (Some students, confused by academic ranks, may include a separate waiting period for a “Doctor.”) But you will not find this, or any other such rule, in published sources; it’s strictly a folk idea circulating by word of mouth on most college campuses.
Another typical piece of campus lore is “The Suicide Rule” notice here that we have another supposed regulation, as if the university has resolved every possible issue with a special statute. “The Suicide Rule,” many students believe, requires that if your roommate commits suicide, the university must give you a 4.0 (straight A grades) for the semester. While you are looking for “The Obligatory Wait” in the rule books, just try finding that one as well! It’s not there, I assure you.
I should mention here that I have had letters and calls from some extremely certain college students and administrators assuring me that regulations such as these are in the printed guidelines on their campus. These correspondents always promise to get back to me with a copy of the relevant regs as soon as they have found them. Not a single one of these people has ever come through with that proof, although it’s true that some professors or departments may announce their own rules for attendance if a teacher is late. Also, there are a few examples of colleges awarding ad hoc grades to students who have suffered some kind of tragedy during a semester. (Usually this turns out to be giving the student an incomplete grade or else awarding the letter grade that he or she has earned so far in that semester.)
Many college newspapers have investigated such campus folklore as “The Obligatory Wait” and “The Suicide Rule,” always concluding their reports with a debunking of such traditions. A campus news story taking another approach appeared in New University, the University of California at Irvine student paper, on June 3, 1991. The student journalist, staff writer Craig Outhier, ended his story thus:
Why stop at simple death? Couldn’t a long and protracted illness be just as emotionally traumatic on a roommate as a quick and painless exit?
How about partial credit for broken limbs? A 3.8 for contracted venereal disease?
Naw.
For now, the only thing you’ll get from your roommate’s death is your own room.
The arrival of computers on campus, with easy access for faculty and students to E-mail and the World Wide Web, rather than decreasing the amount of college folklore, has instead spawned a whole new series of anonymous apocryphal texts. It’s a sort of cyberlore for the on-line college generation. While not strictly speaking folklore in the classic sense—circulating orally and exhibiting constant variation—some of these electronic texts do read much like the oral legends of the past. Here’s a recent example that purports to be a response to a professor’s brain-twisting final exam topic. The E-mails that forwarded this item widely around the Net were generally headed “A true story”:
A thermodynamics professor had written a take-home exam for his graduate students. It had one question: Is hell exothermic or endothermic? Support your answer with a proof.
Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle’s Law or some variant. One student, however wrote the following:
First, we postulate that if souls exist, then they must have some mass. If they do, then a mole of souls can also have a mass. So, at what rate are souls moving into hell and at what rate are souls leaving? I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving.
As for souls entering hell, let’s look at the different religions that exist in the world today. Some of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to hell. Since there are more than one of these religions and people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all people and all souls go to hell.
With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change in volume in hell. Boyle’s Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in hell to stay the same, the ratio of the mass of souls and volume needs to stay constant.
1) So, if hell is expanding
at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter hell, then the temperature and pressure in hell will increase until all hell breaks loose.
2) Of course, if hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until hell freezes over.
So which is it?
If we accept the postulate given to me by Therese Banyan during Freshman year, “that it will be a cold night in hell before I sleep with you” and take into account the fact that I still have not succeeded in having sexual relations with her, then 2 cannot be true, and hell is exothermic.
The student got the only A.
Another piece of recent cyberlore purports to be a witty applicant’s response to the college admissions office that required each would-be student to respond to the question “Are there any significant experiences you have had, or accomplishments you have realized, that have helped to define you as a person?” The applicant responded with an essay that began:
I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees, I write award-winning operas, I manage time efficiently. Occasionally, I tread water for three days in a row.
And, after several more paragraphs of that sort of thing, the applicant ended his brag (similar to the frontier boast of a Davy Crockett or a Mike Fink) with this:
I balance, I weave, I dodge, I frolic, and my bills are all paid. On weekends, to let off steam, I participate in full-contact origami. Years ago I discovered the meaning of life but forgot to write it down. I have made extraordinary four-course meals using only a mouli and a toaster oven. I breed prizewinning clams. I have won bullfights in San Juan, cliff-diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and spelling bees at the Kremlin. I have played Hamlet, I have performed open-heart surgery, and I have spoken with Elvis.
But I have not yet gone to college.
My only question about this impressive performance is this: What’s a “mouli?”
* * *
“Now Urine Trouble”
A doctor instructing a class of medical students tells them that it’s possible to detect the presence of too much sugar in the urine by tasting it. He demonstrates by sticking his finger into a urine sample and then sticking his finger in his mouth. He pronounces the sample too sweet, and asks the students to try it for themselves.
Each student repeats the test, some of them agreeing on the diagnosis, others not quite getting it. None of them notices, until their teacher explains, that he had put his middle finger into the sample but stuck his forefinger into his mouth. The test was of their powers of perception, not of their ability to taste sugar in urine.
* * *
“The Dormitory Surprise”
This story was told by an upperclassman in my dorm at the University of Illinois at Urbana during the first few weeks of the semester in 1967:
This happened last year to a guy who lived here. It was homecoming weekend, and he was expecting his parents to come in and they would then go to the game together. His fiancee and her parents were also coming.
So this guy went to take a shower, and he was coming back to his room with only a towel wrapped around his hips. When he got to the door of his room, he heard voices inside, and he thought it was just some of the guys goofing around in his room. So he whipped the towel off, took his penis in his hand, threw the door open, and yelled “RAT-A-TAT-TAT, you’re all dead.”
And inside the room were his parents, his fiancee, and her parents!
Sent to me in an unsigned letter from Chicago in 1987. I discussed “The Dormitory Surprise” in The Mexican Pet and The Baby Train, with examples from several different colleges and going back to the mid-1950s, proving that the legend existed even before the days of coed dorms on campus. Variations of this story describe the naked student wrapping his or her head in a towel to avoid recognition when forced to walk through a room with other people in it. All such stories—and there are several nonacademic counterparts—project the common caught-in-the-nude nightmare to a real-world situation.
“The Gay Roommate”
I heard a story that sounds like a legend, but I want to know for sure. I heard this when I was in high school as a warning about what can happen at college.
Supposedly, a new student began developing respiratory problems and then noticed some rectal bleeding after a few weeks at school. When he visited the campus doctor, he was told that his respiratory condition came from breathing too much ether, but the bleeding came from anal sex.
The student immediately returned to his room and found a bottle of ether in his roommate’s closet. As soon as his roommate returned, the patient beat him up and then moved out of the room. Apparently, at night, his roommate had been sedating him and then having sex with him.
I originally heard this story about the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse, but later I heard it about UW-Madison, and then a private school in Milwaukee. My roommate heard a variation involving chloroform, but without the bleeding.
So what’s the word? Is this a legend?
From a letter sent to me by Todd Huhn of Watertown, Wisconsin, in October 1991. Internal evidence of variation and distribution clearly marks this as an urban legend, and the dozens of other versions of the story circulating on campuses all across the country confirm that identification. “The Gay Roommate” was a popular story at American colleges and universities from 1989 to 1991. I surveyed the tradition up to May 1991 in The Baby Train, and the above example is one of a dozen further reports that came in later. A student writing from Michigan State University in 1992 quoted his own roommate, insisting, “This story is true; I know it’s true. A friend of my roommate’s in Freshman year, he knew the dude it happened to!” While these campus stories reflect homophobia, and possibly also some latent homosexual desire on the part of men who tell them, the basic story is not merely a product of recent American dormitory living. A similar story circulated in Australian (and probably other) military units in the 1940s describing young naval recruits victimized by older men who first supplied them with alcoholic drinks. In his 1886 edition of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, the Victorian scholar Richard F. Burton mentioned an unscrupulous Middle Eastern official victimizing young European sailors in the same way.
“The Roommate’s Death”
This story takes place in a sorority house on this campus, during Christmas vacation when most of the girls had gone home.
There were two or three girls left in the sorority house. It was late at night and the girls decided that they were hungry, so two of the girls went downstairs to the kitchen. One of the girls went back to the room to rejoin the other girl, leaving one girl downstairs in the kitchen.
A little bit later on, say about a half hour later, the two girls in the room started wondering about the other girl ’cause she hadn’t come back yet. So they went out on the landing and they heard something moving around downstairs. So they called down and nobody answered, the person or whatever it was moving around was still heard.
They were afraid to go downstairs, so they locked themselves in their room and waited for morning. They actually waited about an hour, when they decided to try it again. They were going to open the door when they heard a noise outside—like a scratching, so they got scared and didn’t open the door. The scratching was like somebody dragging somebody down the steps. They were afraid to leave the room ’cause someone was out in the hall.
They stayed in their room till early the next morning until the mailman came around, and they hailed the mailman out the window. He came in, and [they told him] during the night, they had heard a scratching on their door. The mailman came in the front door and went up the stairs, and told the girls to stay in their room, that everything was all right but that they were to stay in their rooms.
But the girls didn’t listen to him ’cause he had said it was all ri
ght, so they came out into the hall. When they opened the door, they saw their girlfriend on the floor with a hatchet in her head.
I heard this in 1983 told at West Georgia College, Carrollton, Georgia. It was supposed to have happened on the University of Illinois campus. This is the way it was told.
This girl got off work and went back to the dorm where she lived. It was late and she and her roommate had an agreement that if either one had brought a guy back to the room, she would put a rubber band on the doorknob. Well, sure enough, the girl gets to her room and there is a rubber band on the doorknob.
The girl had had a tough night and wasn’t in the best of moods. She wasn’t about to hang around in the hallway half the night, so she unlocks the door and goes in. Well, she gets in the room and hears all this heavy breathing and rustling around on her roommate’s side of the room. The girl doesn’t turn on the lights and being as quiet as possible slips out of her clothes, gets in bed and falls asleep.
The next morning the girl wakes up and it’s light outside. She yawns and sits up and looks over on her roommate’s side of the room. Sprawled on the bed is her roommate, gutted and torn apart. There’s blood all over the wall and floor. The girl gets up and starts to dash out of the room. She reaches the door and stops in her tracks. There, printed neatly on the door in blood is, “Aren’t you glad you didn’t turn on the lights?”
The first version of this popular campus legend of the 1960s comes from Linda Dégh’s article “The Roommate’s Death and Related Dormitory Stories in Formation,” in Indiana Folklore, vol. 2, 1969; it was told by an Indiana University student who heard it in her dormitory in 1964, during her freshman year. I have added paragraphing to Dégh’s verbatim text. The broken taboo—“[he] told the girls to stay in their room”—and the male rescuer are typical of the earlier versions of the legend. The second example incorporating the handwriting-on-the-wall motif is more typical of versions told since the 1980s; this text was sent to me in 1992 by Todd Webb of Jonesboro, Georgia. In a variation on the wall-writing theme the message may be written in lipstick, reminiscent of the “AIDS Mary” legend. Students all across the country continue to tell this legend, often as a warning to freshmen by upperclass students or by resident advisers in the dormitories.
Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends Page 42