
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 3, 1991                   TAG: 9104030138
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: LLOYD GROVE/ THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

KIDNEY-HEIST TALE OPERATES ON URBAN-ANXIETY PRINCIPLE

There were gasps at a recent Bethesda dinner party when one of the guests related a shocking story. The story was true, the teller insisted. It came from her daughter in New York, who heard it recently from a school friend, who heard it from someone who actually knew the principals.

It seems that a bunch of friends went to a bar in Manhattan. One met an attractive young woman and decided to stay behind. The others didn't hear from him until he phoned two days later. "I'm at a hotel," he rasped. "I feel horrible. I think I've been drugged. Come get me."

They rushed to the hotel to find him in appalling shape. At a nearby hospital, a doctor discovered a long line of sutures snaking up his lower back. "Your kidney is missing," he announced. "And they did a very professional job."

A Washington Post editor attending the dinner promptly assigned a reporter to check the story out. The reporter came up empty-handed, but recalled hearing a similar tale from the lady at the telefax shop, who heard it from a girlfriend, who heard it from a cousin.

Then came an article in Sunday's New York Times, by journalist-turned-scriptwriter Joe Morgenstern, recounting his experiences writing an episode of NBC's "Law and Order," airing this week, for which a colleague suggested a plot line inspired by a newspaper clipping - "though I never found anyone who had actually seen it," Morgenstern wrote.

The story? "A guy gets mugged in Central Park, wakes up in terrible pain and discovers that someone has cut him open, ripped off one of his kidneys and sewed him up."

"Ah, the kidney heist story!" University of Utah folklore professor Jan Harold Brunvand said this week. He's a specialist in the study of The Urban Legend and an author of five books on the subject.

"It's clearly untrue. The organs have a very short shelf life. It's not like you can take them out, carry them around in a cooler and sell them on the streets of New York City."

The kidney heist story - at least by some accounts - is the latest in a long tradition of urban mythology, by which city dwellers try to master life's workaday chaos or otherwise add zip to their tedious routines.

"What they are is modern legend," said University of Nebraska folklorist Roger Welsch. "Legend has become a way of injecting wonder and mystery and horror and surprise into daily life."

Recent examples of such injections, Welsch said, include the stories about earthworms in the hamburgers of a famous fast-food chain, cans of dog food found in the garbage bins behind well-known pizza outlets, spider eggs in a renowned brand of bubble gum, alligators in the sewers of a notable city and satanic symbols in the logo of a household-products conglomerate.

Library of Congress folklorist Peter Bartis, of the American Folk Life Center, said these tales and others - remember the exploding poodle in the microwave? - reflect the anxieties of modern existence.

"If you look at what's going on in the news today," he said of the purportedly purloined kidney, "it's probably a manifestation of all the anxiety that the average person may harbor, but at a subconscious level."

by CNB