What makes a story legendary? You have to wonder when you hear the same story more than once, when details vary, when it sounds too good to be true and when the teller is vague about the source. Here are three samples of legendlike anecdotes from my recent mail. Each story is about some sort of misunderstanding:
- "Meatballs Learn to Cook"Doug Mallory of Memphis, Tenn., wrote, recalling a story he heard as a student at the University of Tennessee:
"A girlfriend told me this one as true, but she may have been pulling my leg. It seems to fit in with your `Inept Housewife' or `Bungling Bride' category.
"Two male students moved into the apartment next to my friend, and one day one of the guys knocked on her door and asked if she could come next door for a minute to help them with a cooking problem.
"She found that they had browned some ground beef in a skillet, and now they wanted to know how to get it to stick together as a hamburger."
Well, that story may be true, Doug. In college, I once shared an apartment with a guy whose idea of cooking was to form one full pound of hamburger into a giant patty and fry it. Then he would eat half of it for lunch and reheat the rest for dinner. I'm not pulling your leg.
- "The Face is Familiar"
Several people have told Anita Alverio of Pittsburgh about a time when they were walking down the street and saw a familiar face. Trying to remember the person's name, her friends all said they said something like, "Oh, hi there! And what are you up to these days?"
The other person smiles and says, "Oh, I'm just busy being so-and-so (the evening-news anchor) of KDKA (or another local television station). "
Anita has heard the story from different friends, all of whom claimed to have had the same experience but involving different local television personalities who supposedly "roam the streets of Pittsburgh all the time."
But Anita also clipped this item, as reprinted in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from a California newspaper:
"Name-remembering techniques sometimes work and sometimes lead to great gaffes. This story comes from a reader in San Francisco:
"A man seated next to Princess Margaret at a dinner party in England thought she looked familiar but couldn't quite remember her name.
"'And what are you doing these days?' he asked, using one of the recommended ploys for those trying to place the face opposite.
" `I'm still the queen's sister,' she replied."
Well, Anita, they tell a story out here in Utah about Brigham Young patting a small child he meets walking along the sidewalk on the head and asking "Whose little girl are you?" The child supposedly answered, "I'm Brigham Young's little girl."
- "Zero Defect Meets The American Way"
Michael Richerson of Wichita, Kan., has heard this story told at various technical conferences dealing with industrial engineering and quality control:
"An American company needed some computer memory chips, so they placed an order with a Japanese company. The Americans specified an acceptance criterion of 0.2 percent defective, and they ordered 1,000 chips.
"The order arrived in two packages. The larger package contained 998 perfectly good memory chips. The smaller package contained two defective chips with a note saying that they didn't know why the company wanted two defective chips, but it was their policy always to meet customer requirements.
"Since the names of the companies are never mentioned, I have not been able to determine if this really happened. It may be just a way of reflecting on the difference in cultures."
You're right to be suspicious of that one, Michael, since plenty of other stories tell of foreigners misunderstanding Americans' requests. The classic example is the urban legend about the tourists who use sign language to ask a Hong Kong waiter to give their pet poodle something to eat.
The waiter, misunderstanding the request, takes the dog away, cooks it and serves it to the tourists.
- "Curses! Broiled Again," Jan Harold Brunvand's fourth collection of urban legends, is now available in paperback from Norton. Send your questions and legends to Brunvand in care of the Deseret News.
United Feature Syndicate, Inc.