Have you ever . . . ?

Have you ever received one of those chain e-mails that asks you to answer a bunch of questions about your favorite foods, colors, and other things like "Have you ever been to Europe?" They always end with statements like, "Don't spoil the fun! Send this to 15 of your friends." I don't think I have 15 friends, or if I did and forwarded all these messages to them, I surely wouldn't.

Of course, even though it isn't fun for me to reveal how uncultured, untraveled , non-epicurean, and unworldly I am, I don't want to spoil the "fun" for anyone else, so I end up doing as requested about 50 percent of the time. But I think these chain e-mails may be the equivalent of the theory that one fruitcake has been circulating around the world since the beginning of time, forwarded by one unhappy recipient to the next. So I'm thinking about sending an e-mail survey of my own, one that I can answer in the affirmative for a change:

• Has your husband ever set your hair on fire with a party popper?


• Did you ever have a grandmother that accidentally set herself on fire three times, but no one can ever exactly explain how?


• Did you ever get punched in the face by a drunken person at your high school reunion which you'd traveled 500 miles to attend?


• Did you ever dance your heart out trying to get a part in the fourth-grade play square-dance scene (the one where the girls got to dance with the boys) and instead got the rear-end part of the dancing horse behind the most gaseous girl in school (as you found out during rehearsals)?


• Have you ever accidentally sucked a button up your nose after trying to breath through the little holes in the button?


• Have you ever had two separate encounters with two different monkeys on the loose?


• Have you ever had a perfect stranger beat you over the head with Indian corn from a Halloween decoration?


• Have you ever accidentally called your grammar school teacher, Grandma?


• Did the top of your dress ever fall off on the dance floor at a company party?


• Has one of your relatives gone to prison for shooting out a revenuer's eye?

Okay, all of you self-satisfied, aristocratic, globally savvy folk, put that in your pipe and smoke it. Which reminds me, have you ever . . . ? Oh well, never mind. That's a whole new set of questions.

13 Conversations about . . . What was I saying?

Friends and family say I have a great knack for remembering embarrassing stories . . . about them. However, lately I'm losing (not those stories, of course; they're great ammo) but details about other things . . . I think I read that book back in high school, but I'm not sure. Did I see that movie? Yeah, I know I did, but I can't remember what happened. I think I liked it though. Or as that comedian whose name I can't recall says, "I was driving down the rode the other day. Wait a minute; that wasn't me."

So when friend Jill and I were discussing good movies we've seen, she brought up 13 Conversations about the Same Thing. "I know you've seen it because we talked about it," she says.

"Yes, I've definitely seen in but it was a while ago. I can't remember most of it," I answer. "I remember that Alan Arkin was in it right?"

She describes some of the scenes and I can remember bits and pieces of the movie, but that's about it. Then she asks, "Well can I tell you about one special part of it, since you've already seen it?"

"Hmm," I answer. "I think that's the saddest question anybody has ever asked me!"