Thursday, December 10, 2015

Do You Love Your Monkey or Do You Love Me?

Apparently, I've been singing "Monkeys mine, their bitter perfume / breathes a life of gathering gloom" one too many times, because I've been informed it's grounds for divorce.  

Oh well.  I'll stop, because I don't want to annoy my husband... but I was kind of looking forward to making "A Very Monkey Christmas" album and singing, "I saw monkeys kissing Santa Clause, underneath the mistletoe," and singing about Good King Wenselsas seeing "a monkey came in sight, gathering winter fuel," having John Lithgow as Dr Emil Lizardo shout, "Drum while you still can, monkey-boy!" at Peter Weller's Buckaroo Banzai.   

I suppose this penchant for inserting monkeys into songs started with ABBA's "Money! Money! Money!"  because I think it's hysterically funny to sing, "all the things I could do, if I had a little monkey."  But I think there's something deeper going on, and following the chain of monkey associations, I can hear Mike Myers as Dieter asking guests on "Sprockets" about monkeys, which is followed by Peter Seller's voice as Clouseau saying something about a "minkey."  Which goes back to my Dad:  he used to have a high school physics demonstration with a monkey puppet which showed independent vertical and horizontal motion -- the monkey puppet got shot by a BB and would crumble around it.  I'm pretty sure he called it a minkey, until one year the girls in his class corn-rowed the monkey's hair and the puppet attained celebrity status as "Bo Minkey."  

I think at this point Mark would yell, "Help! It's genetic!"

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