Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends (4 page)

“The Surpriser Surprised”

Version #1: “Why I Fired My Secretary”

T
wo men sat at the club, and one said, “Say, how is that gorgeous secretary of yours?”

“Oh, I had to fire her.”

“Fire her? How come?”

“Well, it all started a week ago last Thursday, on my 49th birthday. I was never so depressed.”

“What has that got to do with it?”

“Well, I came down for breakfast and my wife never mentioned my birthday. A few minutes later, the kids came down and I was sure they would wish me a Happy Birthday, but not one word. As I say, I was most depressed, but when I arrived at the office, my secretary greeted me with ‘Happy Birthday,’ and I was glad someone remembered.

“At noon time she suggested that it was a beautiful day and that she would like to take me to lunch to a nice intimate place in the country. Well, it was nice and we enjoyed our lunch and a couple of martinis. On the way back, she said it was much too nice a day to return to the office, and she suggested that we go to her apartment where she would give me another martini. That also appealed to me, and after a drink and a cigarette, she asked to be excused while she went into the bedroom to change into something more comfortable.

“A few minutes later, the bedroom door opened and out came my secretary, my office staff, my wife and two kids, with a birthday cake, all singing ‘Happy Birthday.’

“And there I sat with nothing on but my socks.”

Anonymous photocopies—Xeroxlore—of this classic spicy tale are sometimes headlined “The Boss” or “The 49th Birthday” folklorists sometimes call it “The Nude Surprise Party.” The story has been around since at least the 1920s. Ann Landers first printed a version sent to her by a reader in a 1976 column, and she liked the story well enough to reprint it twice more, in 1993 and 1996. Another version made the rounds in newspapers in 1982 via reprints of a
Los Angeles Times
business column reporting stories told at a local conference of realtors. In the March 1997 issue of
Reader’s Digest
yet another variation appeared, billed as a true story that happened to the former boss of a reader from San Diego.

Version #2: “The Engaged Couple”

A young couple, engaged to be married, had scheduled a premarital counseling session with a minister. But they failed to show up, so the next morning the minister called the bride-to-be’s home.

“She’s in the hospital,” the young woman’s mother told the minister. “She would probably like to tell you herself why she didn’t make it to her session yesterday.”

So the minister went to the hospital, and there he found the young woman in traction with a broken leg and collarbone. But, as she explained the situation, the accident had left her feeling more embarrassed than pained.

She said that her parents had been out of town for the weekend, and they asked her to house-sit. So she and her fiancé decided that this would be a perfect chance to “practice for their honeymoon.” So as soon as her parents left, the couple set about practicing in her parents’ bedroom.

Not long afterward the phone rang. It was her mother, in a panic. She said she had left the iron on in the basement, and would they please turn it off?

The fiancé playfully picked her up and carried her to the top of the basement stairs. Both of them were still naked. When she switched on the lights, shouts of “Surprise! Surprise!” came from the basement. Her parents were standing at the bottom of the stairs, along with relatives, in-laws, and friends. It was a surprise wedding shower.

The shock was too much for the fiancé, and he dropped the girl and fled up the stairs and out of the house. She rolled down the stairs and lay there naked, while her family gaped. Her grandmother reached for her heart medicine. Everyone was too shocked even to cover the girl.

Sent to me in 1987 by a woman in Fort Wayne, Indiana, who heard it from her niece to whom it was told by a minister. The typical ending has the boy carrying the girl piggyback down the stairs; after the lights come on, usually it’s said that “The girl went crazy, and the boy left town.” Among the shocked guests, often, is their minister, but this time he’s involved otherwise in the story. “Practicing for their honeymoon” is a euphemism unique to this telling. A discreet version was incorporated into an episode of
Newhart
in November 1982: Bob’s wife, wearing a filmy nighty, descends the stairs to their rendezvous beside the fireplace, and guests at the planned surprise party take flash photos of her shocked response when the lights come on. There’s a related legend of nudity involving a dog and peanut butter that has been very popular lately. You can find it in the introduction to Chapter 5, “Sexcapades.”

Version #3: “The Fart in the Dark”

Once upon a time there lived a man who had a maddening passion for baked beans. He loved them, but they always had a very embarrassing and somewhat lively effect on him. Then, one day, he met a girl and fell in love. When it was apparent that they would marry, he thought to himself, “She is such a sweet and gentle girl, who will never go for this kind of carrying on.” So he made the supreme sacrifice and gave up eating beans. They were married shortly thereafter.

Some months later his car broke down on the way home from work, and since they lived in the country he called his wife and told her that he would be a little late because he had to walk home. On his way, he passed a small cafe and the odor of freshly baked beans was overwhelming. Since he still had several miles to walk, he figured that he would work off the ill effects before he got home, so he stopped at the cafe. Before leaving he ate three large orders of baked beans.

All the way home he putt-putted, and after arriving he felt reasonably safe that he had putt-putted his last. His wife seemed somewhat agitated and excited to see him and she exclaimed delightedly, “Darling, I have the most wonderful surprise for dinner tonight.” She then blindfolded him and led him to his chair at the head of the dining table. He seated himself and just as she was ready to remove the blindfold, the phone rang. She made him vow not to touch the blindfold until she returned, then went to answer the phone.

Seizing the opportunity, he shifted his weight to one leg and let go. It was not only loud, but ripe as rotten eggs. He took the napkin from his lap and vigorously fanned the air about him. Things had just returned to normal when he felt another urge coming on him, so he shifted his weight to the other leg and let go again. This was a true prize winner. While keeping his ear on the conversation in the hall, he went on like this for ten minutes until he knew the phone farewells indicated the end of his freedom. He placed his napkin on his lap and folded his hands on top of it, smiling contentedly to himself, and was the very picture of innocence when his wife returned, apologizing for taking so long.

She then asked him if he had peeked, and he, of course, assured her that he had not. At this point she removed the blindfold, and there was his surprise—twelve dinner guests seated around the table for his birthday dinner.

This version is another anonymous piece of Xeroxlore that elaborates on earlier earthy tellings with fairy tale–like language and structure. The legend gained some respectability from its inclusion in Carson McCullers’s 1940 book
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.
More recent versions of the story set the action in a darkened car with a double-dating couple seated in back who overhear the girl’s flatulence; the same variation inspired a short film shown in 1997, entitled
The Date.

“The Hairdresser’s Error”

A
woman hairdresser in a big city is the last person in the shop one evening, just tidying up the place before going home. A distinguished-looking man in a three-piece suit taps on the door and begs her to reopen the shop and cut his hair. He explains that he has an important business meeting in the morning and needs to look neat for it. After some pleading, plus offering to pay double her usual price, the man convinces the hairdresser to let him in, against her better judgment, and to give him an after-hours haircut.

The hairdresser has pinned a sheet around his neck and turned to get her comb and scissors. When she turns back towards him, she notices a rhythmic motion under the middle of the sheet in the area of the man’s lap, and she panics, thinking she may have a sexual deviant or worse in the chair.

She grabs a hair dryer and beans the man as hard as she can, knocking him unconscious; then she dials 911 and screams for help. When the police arrive they find the man still out cold with the hairdresser standing guard, still wielding her weapon. They remove the sheet and find—that he had only been cleaning his glasses. When the man recovers consciousness, he promises to sue the hairdresser for an unprovoked attack.

I heard this story from several locations in 1986, and also have heard of prototypes from England. In some versions the hairdresser holds a straight razor to the man’s throat and whips off the sheet. In one from New Zealand the hairdresser takes a swipe at the lump in the middle of the sheet with a hairbrush, and the man shouts, “I was only cleaning my spectacles, you idiot!” In 1989 a bookstore clerk in Minneapolis assured me that the incident had actually occurred in St. Paul. In 1996 I heard from United Airlines pilot Capt. David L. Webster IV of “The Flight Attendant’s Error”: a female attendant asks the captain to speak to a man in the coach section who seems to be masturbating under a blanket. The captain checks, only to find that he has been trying to get a roll of film unjammed from his new camera.

“The Stolen Wallet”

A
New York City office worker is on his regular jogging route in Central Park early one morning before going to work when he is bumped rather hard by another runner. Instinctively, he reaches for his wallet and discovers that it is not in his pocket.

Determined not to be a victim, the man races back to the supposed pickpocket, grabs him vigorously, shakes him, and snarls through clenched teeth, “Give me that wallet!”

The other man, highly intimidated, hands over a wallet.

When the office worker arrives at work and has washed up and changed clothes, he is just telling his coworkers about the incident when his telephone rings. It’s his wife on the phone, saying that she hopes he can borrow money for lunch, because he had forgotten his wallet on the dresser that morning.

In variations of this story the confrontation takes place on a bus or subway, and the stolen item may be a watch. At least with a wallet the unwitting thief can identify his victim from its contents and return the stolen goods! The wallet version was incorporated into the 1975 film
The Prisoner of Second Avenue,
starring Jack Lemmon, based on a Neil Simon play. I have a report of a keynote speaker at a conference claiming that he himself had been the unwitting thief the night before and concluding his anecdote saying, “And now if [John Doe], who is also at this conference, will come forward, I’d like to return his wallet.” A version published in
New York
magazine in 1987 has a Spanish-speaking victim crying “¡Es mio! ¡Es mio!” to the uncomprehending English-speaking thief. A version published in Germany in 1967 ends with the thief exclaiming, “Mein Gott, ich bin ja ein Taschendieb!” (My God, I’m a pickpocket!) A “Moon Mullins” comic strip of 1935 proves that the stolen-watch version goes far back, but European versions are even older, as the following example demonstrates.

An Englishman managed to get aboard a crowded car one evening and was obliged to stand on the back platform. He was very nervous and imagined that one neatly dressed little man avoided his eyes. Reaching down for his watch, he found it missing. Just after that the little man got off the car. The Englishman followed quickly and the little man began to run. The Englishman finally caught him in a yard hiding behind a pile of wood. He said in a commanding voice: “Watch! Watch!” The little man promptly handed over a watch.

Safe at home the Englishman found his own watch on his dresser where he had carelessly left it in the morning and a strange watch in his pocket. Very much upset by what he had done, he advertised in the papers and in due time the little man appeared. The Englishman began an elaborate apology, but the little man shut him off. “It’s quite all right,” he said, “what worried me that night was that I was carrying 3,000 rubles and I was afraid you would demand those.”

This account is from Louise Bryant,
Six Red Months in Russia: An Observer’s Account of Russia Before and During the Proletarian Dictatorship
(originally published in 1918), p. 270.

“The Mexican Pet”

A
couple from New York are on vacation in Florida. One day they take a rented boat out on the bay to go fishing. Off in the distance across the water they see something small bobbing in the waves, and as they move closer they see that it’s a pathetic-looking little dog clinging for dear life to a piece of driftwood. The poor creature is shivering and evidently scared out of its wits. It whines and squeaks pitifully as they fish it out of the sea and bring it aboard.

The couple take the little dog home, dry it off, and feed it, and they run an ad in a local paper: “Found—small dark brown hairless dog with long tail. No collar.” But nobody responds to the ad, and they take the little dog home with them when they return to New York.