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.