part0008

I like to designate the most popular urban legend of the time as “the hottest story going,” and this one was certainly hot during the summer of 1987. In fact, it’s still hot (would I give you old news?). Read on.

The basis of the story is that a young woman wants a quick tan and somehow contrives to schedule extra sessions at a tanning salon. The result of her indiscreet vanity is that she cooks her insides.

First credit for telling me this shocker goes to my University of Utah colleague, Professor Robert Steensma. When he came back to town in mid-August 1987 from a summer-school teaching stint at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Steensma told me two versions he had heard there.

In one, a girl wanting to look nice and tan repeatedly visited the same salon at different times of day. Soon she began feeling ill, and she consulted a doctor. He told her that she had cooked her insides. Version 2 from South Dakota claimed that she fried a muscle in an arm and that the limb had to be amputated.

Later the same day, a student from my summer folklore class reported a story she had heard the night before. This supposedly happened, she said, to the wife of the cousin of the man who had told it to a woman friend of hers who then told her. Something like that.

This time the tanning salon had a rule to protect customers from overexposure: a thirty-minutes-per-day limit. But this girl—friend of a friend of a friend—circumvented that by signing up at four different salons, thus getting four times the recommended dosage.

Her husband began to notice that she “smelled funny,” and her doctor gave her the bad news. Cooked insides and certain death. “It’s funny,” I commented, “that such a dramatic event never made the Salt Lake City papers.”

My student had discussed the story with another friend, who claimed that the tanning-salon roasting had really happened to a girl who was tanning herself into shape to be a swell-looking bridesmaid for her best pal.

So I’m sitting in my office in the second stage of folkloristic research (first, collection; second, classification; third, analysis). I’m labeling a file folder “Cooked Alive: New Legend?” when the telephone rings. The caller, a local person, reads my column in the Deseret News , and she had just heard this awful story from someone at work and was delegated to call and ask whether I thought it was an urban legend.

In her version, a young lady from the small northern Utah town of Tremonton needed a good tan to take to summer cheerleader camp at Utah State University over in Logan. So she signed up at several different tanning salons and went in four or five times per day.

Again, the bad smell developed, and she showered, then showered again. The smell didn’t go away, and when her mother noticed it, she rushed her daughter to the doctor. The diagnosis was “microwaved insides.” Another cooked goose, just for wanting a fast tan.

At that point, I wrote one of my newspaper columns on the story of the girl who was sizzled to medium rare in the tanning salon. When the Salt Lake City Deseret News ran the column on Friday, September 18, they assigned it the wonderful headline that provides the title to this book: “Curses! Broiled Again!” Then the following Tuesday, September 22, in publishing the regular “Dear Abby” column for that day, the DN added the note, “Other variations on the following tanning salon story appeared in last Friday’s ‘Urban Legends’ column by Jan Harold Brunvand.”

Oddly enough, the cooked-goose legend came to Abby from the city of Provo in the state of Utah, via Springfield, Oregon. A concerned mother of a Brigham Young University student had written to ask Abby to warn her readers about the fate of a seventeen-year-old girl that her daughter had described in a letter. The teenager had supposedly fried herself under the tanning lamps and was said to be lying “totally blind” in the Utah Valley Regional Medical Center in Provo with an estimated twenty-six days to live.

Abby was suspicious about that precise figure of “twenty-six days” and called the medical center. She learned that there was no such patient being treated, though the story was known to the center spokesperson. In fact, Joann Cox, the secretary who answered the telephone, told Abby’s staff that she had also heard the same story told recently in Pocatello, Idaho.

Dozens of my readers clipped Dear Abby’s column for that day and forwarded it to me along with the versions they had heard in Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, and even Florida. (Why do they need tanning salons in Florida?) Noting the emphasis on Utah in the two column versions, one folklorist sent me the “Dear Abby” clipping with the scribbled note, “Is Utah now the center of new urban legends?”

Actually, I had wondered the same thing at first. Practically everyone I spoke to in Utah for the next few months tried to tell me a new variation on the legend. My favorite was from a caller in the city of West Jordan who said the doctor had told the victim, “To cure this condition would be like frying a steak and then trying to bring it back to life.” Huh? You couldn’t bring a raw steak back to life, could you?

Anyway, there are at least two interesting questions here. First, did the story just develop out of the blue in the middle of the summer of ’87? Second, had it, perhaps, actually happened somewhere, possibly in the West or Midwest, where many of the versions I collected came from?

But coming “out of the blue” seemed too simple, and I soon found that the story was older and more widespread than I suspected. The first publication of it that I have uncovered, however, was still from the Midwest. A news story on July 16, 1987, bylined Ross Bielema, in the Dubuque (Iowa) Telegraph Herald , described and debunked several local versions of the story. The young woman was said to be seventeen, worked at Hartig Drug store, was a student at Loras College, needed the tan for a wedding; she had a bad smell, got the bad news, etc.—the works. Bielema did a nice job on the story, incidentally, and (I must admit it) he scooped both Abby and me by a month.

Meanwhile, I learned that just about the same time that I was beginning to hear the story told in Utah, the same legend had been posted to the nationwide computer hookup “ARPANET” on August 10 by a subscriber at Stanford University. (Why do they need tanning salons in California?)

“Curses! Broiled Again!” was obviously an appealing story that summer more because of its horror content and warning function than because of any actual gruesome medical case that any of the informants knew about firsthand. In other words, the cardinal rule of urban legends definitely applies here: The truth never stands in the way of a good story. But where does a story like this come from?

I would trace one theme in the legend to an earlier rumor about home tanning lamps, which always carry important safety warnings and require certain precautions. Last summer, a man in Ohio wrote me this: “About six years ago when I was shopping for a sun lamp, the appliance salesman emphasized the reliable timer on one model. Then he recounted as a fact that a woman using a lesser product fell asleep and had her contact lenses fused to her eyeballs.”

The fused-cornea-and-contact story, you may remember, is an urban legend usually associated with an imaginary welding accident that somehow generates microwaves that allegedly dry up the fluids in the eye.

Another connection here is the specialized horror stories about microwaved pets and babies, which are part of the lore warning against modern technology and product misuse. While accidents with appliances do happen, these horror stories floating around in different versions in oral tradition almost certainly did not happen. In some of them, as in the tanning-salon story, it sounds like people are confusing ultraviolet tanning rays with the microwaves used in cooking.

What could follow from overuse of a home sunlamp or extra tanning sessions is serious burns to the skin. That’s just good old-fashioned sunburn, which doesn’t smell bad, unless you count the ointments used to soothe the ache.

There’s another growing fear expressed in this story: the mounting evidence that too much tanning will increase your risk of skin cancer. Nearly everyone knows by now of the danger from too much sun, but nearly everyone seems willing to catch a few extra rays anyway .

“It can’t happen to me” is the assumption, though it might happen to some silly young thing like this girl in the story. So far I have heard only of females suffering this particular fate, but it may be that male versions of the cooked-insides story just have not yet made their way to me.

The tanning-salon-accident story has not died out; in fact, it seems to have held on through the winter and revived strongly the following summer. In January 1988, for example, I got the story again from Bill Kestell of New Holstein, Wisconsin, who says his secretary heard it from a girlfriend who was told it by a friend at work who was supposed to have been in the same wedding party as the victim. In March, a graduate student in English at Iowa State University, Ames, reported the legend being told by her roommate who heard it from a friend who thought she may have read it in Glamour magazine. Could be, I suppose, though I have not found it there.

The following month I got a report from Pacifica, California. This victim was a bride, not a bridesmaid, and the storyteller asserted that the lamps at tanning salons really do emit microwaves, as this story proves. I thought it was the other way around, that the lack of microwaves in tanning lamps proves that the story is false.

The latest versions of “Curses! Broiled Again!” came in the mail during the summer of 1988, about a year after I first heard it from Bob Steensma. Here’s a report from Christine A. Lehman, writing from Santa Ana, California, whose letter demonstrates one way that the story may be inserted into conversations: “I was looking at a newspaper ad for a tanning parlor and mentioned to one of my co-workers that I might go check it out. She got a very serious look on her face. ‘Oh, you better be real careful. I just heard the most awful story about those places from my cousin. Her best friend was about to get married, and she decided she wanted to have a real dark tan ….”

Need I continue this sad story? The moral it teaches, of course, is “Curses! Broiled Again!”

Most recently, I have been hearing what might be called “The General Health and Fitness Version” of the legend. For example, Lynda M. Sholly of Granger, Indiana, wrote me in July 1988 about the story as she heard it, concerning “a young woman who was physically active in exercise … always very careful regarding her appearance and bodily habits. She strove to always look and smell her best.”

There is nothing whatever in this version about brides or bridesmaids, cheerleaders, trips to Hawaii, or even deliberate overuse of tanning salons. But when the inevitable bad smell develops, the fitness freak’s doctor asks whether she has been going to a tanning salon. When she replies in the affirmative, he warns her, “There’s really nothing I can do. You wanted this artificial tan, and now you are paying for it, but you are rotting away from the inside, and eventually you’ll die from the rotting.” (In a similar version of the story sent from Illinois, the doctor explains that his patient’s body is unable to clear itself of dead cells caused internally by excessive exposure to the tanning lamps and that his patient will be dead in six months.)

It would seem, in the final analysis, that “Curses! Broiled Again!” is partly a warning against overdoing a health routine in general, rather than merely against tanning salons in particular.

Postscript: In October 1988, I received a letter from a woman in Orem, Utah, who had just heard at her hairdressers about a girl, “probably a BYU coed,” who had cooked her insides by visiting several tanning salons in one day. The woman commented, “This sounds too bizarre to be true. Do you know if it is fact or legend?” I sent a one-word answer to her question—the L-word, if you know what I mean.