ELEVATOR TALK
NOTE: If you’ve consulted this site in order to learn how to break the ice on elevators — I am sorry. Let’s get this idea out of the way right now. Other folk journalists may offer tips for conversation while encased going up or down. I suggest taking the stairs. (Better for ya!)
Elevator conversation is awkward enough, but I remember one legend regarding lifts that my parents passed down to me. This is a tale of two white tourists riding an elevator in a Park Avenue hotel in New York. Yankee baseball slugger Reggie Jackson gets in at some point, pulling his doberman along on a leash.
As they all ride together, Jackson commands his dog: “Sit!”
At which point the tourists sit down.
Folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand catalogued many similar myths in his funny book The Choking Doberman, W.W. Norton, 1984.
http://www.janbrunvand.com/about.html
And now back to our regularly scheduled convo tips from your local folk journalist…
P.S. Reggie Jackson, interviewed by a reporter for a Rochester, NY newspaper said he’d heard the story a thousand times but, “I’d never own a dog in New York. Whatever you’ve been told isn’t true.”
