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No matter how many times this joke-cum-legend is passed off as a recent tale, nothing will change the fact that it's at least 40 years old. A 1988 issue of Reader's Digest published: A 1965 joke book included a version involving a headachy wife who slips out of a costume party, switches outfits at home, then returns to the country club dance where she’d left her husband. She spots a figure wearing her husband’s costume, and a bit of dancing and wickedly persuasive moonlight leads to her romancing its wearer in the back seat of a parked car. They part, and (as in all other versions of this tale), she arrives home before her husband does. When she asks her hubby how his night was, his description of the evening has him trading places with the bartender, a dour fellow who had previously complained about never having the opportunity to get in on the usual ribald Halloween party fun. This legend is a neat reverse twist on the typical mistaken-identity legend in which an unsuspecting individual — either through the manipulation of others or his own lustful excesses — ends up in bed with the wrong partner. In this particular tale, however, a suspicious wife attempts to maneuver her husband away from other women and into her own bed, but her mistrust of her spouse is unfounded, and she is the one who ends up with the wrong partner. Much like the Birthday Suited legend, a spouse who unfairly underestimates his or her partner is placed in an embarrassing and awkward position as a result. Proof that you can’t keep a good story down are recent appearances of this tale told as true, first-person accounts. The following comes from a 1998 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine: This version, which adds a touch of incest to the mix, was published in Playboy magazine in 2004: The story was also told in:Holt, David and Bill Mooney. Spiders in the Hairdo. Little Rock: August House, 1999. ISBN 0-87483-525-9 (p. 31). The Big Book of Urban Legends. New York: Paradox Press, 1994. ISBN 1-56389-165-4 (p. 120).
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