| Good luck? Bad luck? A worthless slip of paper? |
If this story hadn't actually happened to me, I'm not sure I would believe it myself. But the sequence of events was so horrible, it remains indelibly burned in my memory. And it all started with a fortune cookie.
It was a Friday the 13th in the late 1980s. I was having lunch in a now-defunct suburban Chinese restaurant. After paying my bill, I unwrapped the fortune cookie that came with my tab and cracked open the fragile folded cookie.
And then the nightmare officially began.
Like most people, I do read the slips of paper inside fortune cookies. And I'm familiar with the superstitious belief that in order for the fortune to come true, one has to actually eat the entire cookie. In this case, I had eaten the entire cookie before I read the fortune, a mistake I'll never make again. The fortune: "You will receive some bad news, but it will pass."
Huh? Bad news? I crumpled up the fortune and threw it back on the table. Later that afternoon I received a phone call from my physician's office. "Now, don't worry," the nurse said, "because this is just a preliminary test, but ... your blood work isn't good." The doctor, she said, would need me to come in immediately for more tests."
"Could this be fatal?" I asked the nurse. There was a long pause. "You'll need to ask the doctor," she said.
Over the weekend I wrote out a will, planned my funeral and, on a "last meal" kind of binge, ate a full chicken dinner at Stroud's, a box of Lamar's doughnuts and an entire Tippins coconut cream pie. On Monday I received another phone call from the same nurse: "The first test was inaccurate. You're completely fine."
Fine and seven pounds fatter. But the point is that I had finally received a fortune cookie fortune -- my first and last, I believe -- that actually came true. Every fortune I've opened since has had the same old cliches and platitudes: "You bring joy to your friends." "You will go on a marvelous adventure." "You will hear from a friend very far away." (My current favorite: "You glow with the light of goodness.")
No, I've never opened a cookie to see "Will you marry me?" although at least one customer paid Richard Ng, the owner of the Bo Lings restaurant empire, for fortune cookies with that custom-printed fortune. Ng used to manufacture his own fortune cookies for a brief period.
"He had this kind of Rube Goldberg machine," Bo Lings publicist Linda Rostenberg tells me. "It had, like, a million working parts. He finally gave up and went back to ordering his fortune cookies from a company on the East Coast."
Even when Ng was making his own cookies, he paid one of the bigger fortune cookie manufacturers to provide the prewritten fortunes. Rostenberg says customers prefer a certain style of "fortune."
"It needs to have suggested winning lottery numbers printed on the back. People do play those numbers."
Rostenberg has never gotten a fortune in a cookie that could be considered a bad fortune.
"Those kind of fortunes are pretty difficult to come across," she said. "I like my fortunes to be nice and nebulously optimistic."
Me too.
Showing 1-1 of 1
like
dislike
