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Dad & I found a monkey in a Wendy’s

When I was a kid, I found a monkey.

Siamang at the Naples Zoo, photo courtesy of Pete Corradino.


A Siamang, photo courtesy of JunglePete Corradino.

Technically, it wasn’t a monkey, it was an ape called a Siamang, but I wouldn’t learn that detail for many years. 30 years, to be precise(ish).

Back on that day in the late 1970s, dad and I stopped at Wendy’s.

I guess we were there for lunch. We definitely weren’t there for primates.

We chose a table and I sat down. Dad was about to go to the counter to order when I noticed there was a bag behind my chair, presumably left by the recently departed occupants of the next table.

(This isn’t the weird part of the story).

In my memory it was one of those canvas totes like they sell at LL Bean, but I honestly can’t recall much about the bag.

Other than the fact that the bag was moving.

The bag was moving because there was a monkey inside.

Long hairy arms reached up out of the bag and grabbed the back of my chair. A small furry head followed and the two of us had what seemed to me to be pretty meaningful moment.

The events that followed probably unfolded quickly, but in my memory they happened in slow-mo:

My dad matter-of-factly instructed me not to talk to strangers or feed the monkey, since it might have a special diet.

My dad was very practical.

My dad went to call a deputy to come and pick up the monkey, since dad figured mom would kill us both if we took it home. Plus, it’d be wrong to take a lost-and-found monkey home.

While dad was at the counter asking for the manager and I was chatting with my new simian friend, a Wendy’s employee began to wipe down the table, saw the monkey, and freaked the fuck out.

The memory may be slightly murky, but I’m pretty confident in the sequence of events because I thought the employee was screaming because she saw me.

Which was more than a little upsetting. I was wearing my favorite dress! I loved that dress! Why was the woman screaming at me? Didn’t I look adorable in my favorite dress?

A girl came running in from the parking lot, panicked because she’d left her sister in a bag.

I swear that’s what she said.

“I forgot my sister. She was in the bag.”

She grabbed the diaper-clad creature and the bag, and then she ran back out.

I immediately stopped caring about the Wendy’s employee who was still staring in my direction and screaming, for I had just had an epiphany.

Wow! My parents can trade my baby brother in for a monkey! I knew this had to be possible!

My parents didn’t trade in my brother, but I guess in the long run that worked out okay.

(Still not the weird part).

Now that I think about it, this incident probably precipitated both my lifelong love of primates and my lifelong wariness around fast food.

Fast-forward a few years.

I was at a new school and one of my classmates lived on a monkey sanctuary. I was at his birthday party or something. We’ll call him JunglePete, because that’s his name.

(Calling a kid JunglePete would be weird, but at the time he was still just plain “Pete,” so in the final analysis this isn’t the weird part, either).

I was talking to one of his sisters. This, I shit you not, is a pretty accurate approximation of the conversation she and I had:

Her: “My sister left a monkey in a Wendy’s one time!”
Me: “We found a monkey in a Wendy’s one time!”
Her: “No way!”
Me: “For real. A monkey!”
Her: “That’s crazy! I wonder if it happens a lot?”

For smart kids, we weren’t always very smart.

Fast-forward a whole lot more years, to last Saturday, June 15, 2013.

Husband and I were at the Central Florida Zoo with JunglePete, his wife and son, and his father and his father’s wife.

jpsiamang

.

Our first stop was the Siamangs.

When we made plans to meet at the zoo, I didn’t understand there was a personal nature to our mission. I thought we were just too cheap to go to Sea World during the peak season and had chosen a more off-the-beaten track Father’s Day outing destination.

It turns out that in the 70s, the sanctuary had a rescued Siamang named Bridget. Eventually, Bridget went to live at the Central Florida Zoo, which had better facilities for apes and a mate for Bridget. Bridget had some babies over the years, but she rejected one of them. JunglePete’s parents took in the baby, who they named Topaz.

We were at the Central Park Zoo to visit with relatives of their old friends, Bridget and Topaz.

(We haven’t gotten to the moment of weirdness in the story yet, but we’re getting closer).

After we visited with the Siamangs, we wandered around the zoo for a few more hours.


JunglePete & I at the Central Florida Zoo, photo courtesy of Eric “Husband” Gordon.

(Whatever is happening in this photo may or may not be a little weird, but is otherwise unrelated to this post).

At some point, JunglePete and I ended up back at the Siamangs and I casually mentioned to Pete that my dad and I found a monkey one time in a Wendy’s in Venice, Florida.

JunglePete replied that his family once almost left someone behind in a Wendy’s in Venice, Florida. But they didn’t leave a monkey – they left Topaz! Fortunately, they remembered as soon as they got back to their van and JunglePete’s older sister dashed back into the restaurant to reclaim her.

Being older and a little bit wiser, we understood that we were remembering the same event.

Okay, to be honest, we didn’t realize it immediately.

We didn’t realize it until Husband started laughing at us for being idiots.

Then we realized it was the same incident. What. Ever.

The fact that our childhoods had intersected years before we met was, even to us, pretty weird.

Then I made JunglePete talk to the Siamang. (While I made a video so he couldn’t deny it later).


[embedded video: me forcing JunglePete to speak Siamang]

Then 6 full-grown adults crammed themselves into a 1951 1/5 size replica train operated by a dude in a conductor’s hat who probably didn’t even think it was weird to be wedging himself into a tiny car and driving grownass people around all day in a miniature steam train.

I bet you think I’m making that part up.

IMG_2269

I’m not.

This post is full of hazy memories from the late 1970s and early 80s. JunglePete’s mom and my dad are both deceased, so you’re at the mercy of mine and JunglePete’s memories on some of the details (and may god have mercy on your souls) but we do have witnesses who can corroborate the important points.

While writing this post I realized that I still have a habit of automatically checking behind my chair whenever I sit down in a restaurant, hoping to find another monkey.

I haven’t ever found another one. It’s probably a rare occurrence, but if you ever find one, please let me know!

On Saturday, standing there watching the relatives of the gibbon I met at Wendy’s several decades ago (and a hundred miles away), with the people who left the ape – that was weird. I think the word surreal is overused and often abused, but I’d go so far as to label the moment surreal.

Back in the 70s none of this was newsworthy. Or if it was, it didn’t occur to anyone involved to contact the press. Very few things in Florida are particularly odd to native floridians (except the weird & crazy crap that snowbirds and transplants do, but that’s a subject for another day). While writing this post I did, however, do a bit of googling and turned up a picture of Pete’s mom and Topaz from an unrelated news article about the sanctuary:

janietopaz
JunglePete’s mom, Janie Corradino, with Topaz, Sarasota Herald-Tribune, December 15, 1978.

As for that day way back when? After lunch, dad and I went about our usual errands. We probably went to Lido Beach so I could play on the swings or up to Jungle Gardens to visit with dad’s friends. They’d shoot the breeze while I watched them milk the cobras to make anti-venom.

You know, the usual father-daughter stuff.

—–

editor’s note: I just changed some of the dates because JunglePete informed me I was off by a year or two here and there.

Also:

Full disclosure: obviously, it wasn’t a monkey. It was a lesser ape, but monkeys make better headlines. Plus, from 1978 to 2013 I thought it was a monkey so I use the word monkey a lot in this post even though I am well aware of the difference. Get over it.

That disturbance in the Force Martha Stewart feels every day is just me waking up

Untitled
[embedded image: post-smoothie cleanup operation]

This morning I decided to make a green tea fruit smoothie because I had a large quantity of frozen fruit. This is not rocket surgery. You put fruit, green tea, honey and lime juice in a blender. Then you paint the ceiling with the smoothie when you accidentally turn the blender back on after Husband removes the lid.

I make it sound much easier than it is.

In between, there are a few intermediary steps that involve destroying Husband’s kitchen appliances, as well as a significant amount of profanity.

Destruction and profanity. That pretty much sums up my entire cooking style.

To be fair, the death of Husband’s beloved kitchen appliances was not exactly my fault.

Much like the ape uprising wasn’t exactly Caesar’s fault in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, but was more precisely the result of what is known in scientific circles as the Ricardo Montalban Effect, an inevitable trajectory begun when Cornelius and Zira travelled back through time in Escape from the Planet of the Apes.

I’m not sure Husband sees it that way. Frankly, Husband should have seized operational control of this entire enterprise as soon as he heard me snuffling around in the kitchen, but he didn’t.

So really, who’s to blame here?

Ricardo Montalban, obviously.

First, the blender mysteriously refused to work. Husband joined me in the kitchen as soon as he heard me muttering and swearing at the blender. The indicator lights were on and the outlet worked, but no matter how much button-pushing we tried, the blender was an inert object. Our blender has 3 buttons. It’s not a complicated device.

For a brief moment I thought I’d well and truly lost my ability to function as an adult, so I felt better when it didn’t work for Husband, either.

House elves, we* agreed, are to blame for the death of the blender. I would feel bad if Ricardo Montalban was blamed for killing our blender.

At that point, Husband suggested we use the mixie. He dumped the ingredients from the blender carafe into the mixie carafe and started the mixie, which promptly broke. The little plastic pieces that spin the blades all broke off.

To be fair, the mixie has endured years of steady, almost daily use, and I contend it was time for a new one. I never touched the mixie, so clearly this was in no way my fault. I didn’t even suggest using it.

Clearly, this was Husband’s fault.

Although I may have been the one who failed to warn him that the pineapple chunks were still frozen and that there was a quarter cup of honey in the mix just waiting for an opportunity to ooze to the bottom of the carafe and gum up the blades. So that may have been my fault, but who can say, really?

While Husband was standing over the mixie, possibly administering Last Rites, I plugged the blender back in and hit the start button in what I figured was an act of futility. Of course the bastard roared to life. One of the three buttons didn’t work, so it’s still a bit of a mystery what’s up, but “on” and “off” were in good working order so who needs to the pulse function?

Husband dumped the ingredients back into the blender carafe, at which point we discovered that hard clump of honey and pineapple in the bottom of the mixie carafe.

You don’t need this much detail, and we don’t know for sure this is what killed the mixie, but I like typing the word “mixie.”

We then made smoothies without any further difficulty.

Unless you count the part where Husband removed the lid from the blender and I immediately reached over to make sure the blender was turned completely off so that we wouldn’t have any more accidental disasters. The carafe was still sitting on the blender body, where Husband left it when he removed the lid. Instead of powering down when I hit the button, the blender roared to life and geysered smoothie all over the kitchen counter and everything on that counter.

Obviously, it was his fault for not maintaining situational awareness (read: remembering that I was still in the room) and taking the carafe off the blender body before he removed the lid.

Husband does not agree with my logic.

In closing, making smoothies is serious business. Also, don’t forget to clean out the toaster while you’re wiping smoothie goo off of every other surface in the room.

—————
*We. I. One of those.

Wrath of the Titans (Or, this movie sucks so much it will break your furnace)

Wrath of the Titans is a clunky inept sequel to a clunky inept remake of a clunky inept movie from the 1980s. Young Boomers/older Gen Xers, who thought the original Clash of the Titans was great because they were young and impressionable when it first came out (and were probably stoned when they saw it) are now the people green-lighting the big budget IMAX 3D reboots of movies that they would realize weren’t very good if they weren’t currently working as “Creatives” and consequently making business decisions while smoking pot.

The people who greenlit this movie also know two things. One, that the kids who are willing to shell out weekend box-office don’t comprehend, or care, that the original movie was Not Great. Two, GenXers will Netflix or purchase the reboot in a fit of pique and/or out of misguided nostalgia. What this means is this: lots of people will get paid.

Everybody wins.

Except us, because we’re watching it. Right. Now.

This movie, like all movies, co-stars Liam Neesen.

Seriously. What the hell?

I just watched The Haunting (1963), one of the all-time scariest movies of all time ever. I spotted the 1999 remake on HBOHD and, being too sick to think, decided to see if it was as bad as I remembered.

It was. Got a post about that drafted, you’ll have to wait for it a little longer – the relevant point here is that the remake starred Liam Neesen.

Husband decided to watch all the Star Wars movies. We watched 4, 5 and 6 over the holidays. But we know who’s in the the first 3: Liam Neeson.

Our Tivo, OverLord II, recorded Unknown for us. Never heard of it. Looked at the description. Liam Neeson.

The Netflix fairy sent Battleship. Liam Neeson.

The Dark Knight Rises? Liam Neeson.

Maybe the connection here isn’t “Liam Neeson.” Maybe it’s “our questionable movie selection judgement.”

I’ve been sick for 3 weeks. I don’t know what Husband’s excuse is. I guess that doesn’t explain the last 20some years of our movie watching co-existence, does it?

Moving on.

I guess I have to quit copying IMDB links for Liam Neeson movies and pay attention to the screen if I want to describe Wrath of the Titans to you. There aren’t any spoilers in here. To be fair, I think to have a movie spoiled you probably need to care about the outcome. Trust me, no one should care about the outcome of this movie.

Except Liam Neeson’s agent, who should probably wake up with a horse head in his bed or something. This dude has been in some shitty, shitty movies.

Wrath of the Titans. Wrath of the Titans is about Perseus and Zeus and a bunch of other Gods who lived back in the Ancient Greek Lack of Hygiene World.

Liam Neeson is Zeus. His half-human son, Perseus, has to rescue him from the underworld and

I just realized I’ve been sitting here trying to remember why the guy woke up with the horse head in his bed in the Godfather and I’ve forgotten what came next in that unfinished sentence you see above this paragraph. I fall asleep every time I try to watch the Godfather. I’ve seen the scene but I have no idea what it means. (What? It was before my time. Plus I was afraid of New Jersey as a kid so the Godfather isn’t really my thing. Sorry).

Back to Wrath of the Titans.

Perseus has Poseiden’s pitchfork. It’s a Magical God Pitchfork, which means that it glows orange whenever it’s near manure, I think. That describes the overall quality of the script for this movie, so the pitchfork glows a lot. Husband thinks it might be more complicated than that, but Husband had to get up at 6 a.m. on a Saturday and work all day and he’s had a few drinks so I don’t know that you should trust him.

Plus, he’s still really bitter about the whole midi-chlorians thing, which he seems to be holding Liam Neeson personally responsible for.

So, Perseus has the pitchfork and he goes off to find his Dad.

Perseus ends up in a cave with Bill Nighy, one of our favorite actors. Nighy performs a monologue from a one-man Off Broadway show. Or outtakes from Love Actually. I’m not really sure, but I think it must be one of those. Then he shows Perseus and Andromeda a shortcut to destroy the Underworld that seems to defeat the whole “I’m on an epic quest” story-arc.

Husband: “There’s a small thermal exhaust port right below the main port!”

Liam Neeson, incidentally, was in Love Actually.

Wait, what’s Andromeda doing there? When did she show up? Perseus rode off alone on his Pegasus. Then he fought a bunch of badly rendered monsters and then I think he flew around some more.

Whatever.

Sometimes the dialogue is hard to understand. The sound mixing is actually pretty good. To be honest, the biggest problem is that we keep yelling lines from other movies, which makes it hard for us to hear the movie we’re watching. Husband hasn’t seen Taken, and neither of us has seen Taken 2 or the forthcoming Taken 3: the Quickening, but all of the trailers look the same so it seems safe to just make up dialogue.

Seriously, how many movies can there be in the Someone Stole Liam Neeson’s Daughter franchise?

It’s possible I made Taken 3 up…but I bet it gets made.

Since Perseus gets around on a fast-flying Pegasus, I’m not really clear on how all the other characters seem to be able to keep up with him. Nevertheless, Pegasus and Perseus go flapping away and everyone they left behind is just somehow with them in the next scene.

Husband: “A small one-man fighter should be able to penetrate the outer defense!”

Hang on a second, there’s some kind of fire-monster warrior guys attacking our band of plucky morons. That’s sort of cool.

Honestly, I have no idea what’s happening.

Husband: “Get this big walking carpet out of my way.”

The tagline for Wrath of the Titans is “Feel the Wrath.” That’s the best they could do?

Anyway, Andromeda and Perseus are on an epic quest. At some point while I was trying to make up a joke about feeling the wrath a bunch of shit happened and now I’m confused about who’s fighting who or what the quest is. It seems to have changed.

I actually thought the movie was over because they’d gotten out of the Underworld and put on deodorant (I think that’s what they were doing. I might be mistaken). But now the people who I thought were mortal enemies are fighting on the same side and I can’t figure out who in the hell they’re fighting.

Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers summed it up when he wrote, “…Clash of the Titans sucketh the mighty big one.”

We aren’t even bothering to recite movie dialogue anymore, we’re just moaning and mumbling to ourselves. Husband just said something about his blast-shield being down, but, having realized that the credits are rolling and our servitude is over, we’re both too busy scrambling for the remote to think clearly.

post-script
After the movie ended I was giving this post a quick edit to remove eighty percent of the profanity while Husband stared at the blank TV screen looking, frankly, happier than he’d looked over the last 92 minutes. That was when our furnace – which is located in the basement – directly below the television – emitted a terrible sound.

Husband has been down there for the last 10 minutes trying to repair it enough that it will limp along until Monday. Mostly, we’d prefer not to pay Double Jeopardy Magical Super-Overtime, or whatever the rate is you have to pay for a furnace repair at 10 p.m. on a Saturday night in February. Honestly, I’m also a little afraid if we call the furnace company they’ll send Liam Neeson over. Or, the more likely scenario will occur: my cough medicine will take control of my mouth and I’ll just blurt out a request that they not to send Liam Neeson.

They probably don’t get a lot of out-of-the-blue requests to not have Liam Neeson dispatched to people’s homes. It actually wouldn’t be the craziest thing I’ve ever called and asked them. Still, cross your fingers that Husband’s repair gets us through. Just in case, we won’t be subjecting the furnace to any more bad movies this weekend. It’s all Downton Abbey from here on out.

Yeah. Right.

The Truelife Undead Adventures of GhostCat

Are you here looking for information about DC’s Demon Cat, who was alleged to prowl around the grounds of the White House and U.S. Capitol? You’re in the wrong place, but you might as well stick around because every day is Halloween around here and I have a ghost story for you all the same!

One day, while I was making some afternoon coffee, I looked out our kitchen window and saw the neighbor’s kids giggling and intently watching one of our upstairs windows. One of them waved up at the window. My office window. Since it wasn’t the window I was looking out, and I’m the only one home, that was a bit…unsettling.

I went outside to see what was up.

The kids told me they’d been watching our kitty sun itself in the window.

We don’t have a cat.

GhostCat Reenactment

I asked her if she could still see the kitty. Nope.

I asked her where the kitty went. She said the big orange cat got up, stretched, and hopped down off the window sill.

Creepy? Yes.

Surprising? Not really.

GhostCat apparently took up residence here in our house last year around Halloween. As one of the few houses in Alexandria, Virginia not claiming a ghost, I guess we were due.

I haven’t seen GhostCat myself and we’ve never owned an orange cat. Husband’s grandmother had a big orange cat, maybe it just took a while for him to find us? If cats can have ghosts and ghosts can sneak in to your house, we figure that’s how GhostCat got here.

You can’t prove it didn’t happen that way!

Our Official Ghost Cat Sightings began when JunglePete visited last Halloween. On the first morning, he mentioned that our cat walked over him a lot before finally settling in to sleep by his pillow.

We laughed at him, chalking it up to travel fatigue.

Since then, 3 little girls and one allegedly sober adult claim to have seen the big orange cat sitting in the window.

There are few things as creepy as watching someone wave and greet someone only they see, especially when you know there’s no one else in the house. And it’s always the same window – the window I have my back to when I work at my desk.

The window I have my back to right now.

Hang on a second, I need to nervously glance over my shoulder a few times.

Okay. I’m done.

Nope. One more time.

Okay, where was I?

Right. I’ve spent a lot of time standing in my yard at all times of the day trying to figure out what they could be seeing but there’s nothing there, and definitely nothing creating a reflection that looks either orange or feline. (We just tell little kids our kitty is very shy. My neighbors would kill me if I filled their kids heads with ideas about ghostly pet hauntings).

In light of the fact that one family turned their house into a haunted hospital last halloween and some guy wearing a clown costume was chasing people with a chainsaw, I don’t know why I’m concerned about inflicting psychological damage on the little ones. Yeah, sure, fine, that was Halloween and this…isn’t.

Maybe I should tell them we have a Cheshire Cat!

Recently, a friend and her adorable hound were visiting for the afternoon. Carolyn and I were knitting and watching a movie when the dog hopped up, ran across the room wagging her tail, and started behaving like she was trying to befriend another animal. She then trotted around the house with her new friend for about an hour. We both found the dog’s behavior terribly peculiar. The hound now runs around our house looking for her friend whenever she comes over, although even with her canine friends, GhostCat can be elusive.

I don’t know why it only just occurred to me that we should make a video of this behavior. I’ll keep you posted on that. I think we should also bring in another dog, one that hasn’t “met” GhostCat.

I’ll work on that.

Now that I think about it, ghostly pet eminences aren’t completely unknown in my family.

My uncle is apparently being haunted by my grandmother’s dog, a mastiff cross who, I suspect, could do some serious spectral damage. Do you think it’s possible to drown in ectoplasmic drool?

Things

My brother has spoken approximately 27 words in his entire life. It’s possible he speaks at work, when he’s deep in the bowels of the Pentagon creating the dinosaur-human hybrid super-soldiers that you must pretend to know nothing about, but I can’t vouch for that.

He gets this lack of verbosity from our father.

Among my mother and her legion of siblings, there has not been a documented break in the conversation since 1932. There are rumors that there was a moment of collective silence at a Church service in 1953, but lacking credible eye-witnesses, I choose not to believe it. Conversations in my mother’s family are like the audio recordings NASA pumps into space, they will be floating far out into the Universe long after our sun explodes and our galaxy is snuffed out in a fiery cataclysm.

My father, on the other hand, was a man of few words.

I don’t mention these conversational contrasts because I worry that someday life-forms in a distant galaxy are going to pick up an argument over cheeze-it flavors on their radio telescopes, which will have far-reaching implications for their civilization.

I mention it because my father had an effective method for dealing with busy bodies – those people who won’t take no for an answer and demand to know what else you need to do that could possibly be more important than what they want you to do.

The conversation would go something like this:

“But surely you can stay for a few more hours.”
“No, I’m sorry, I have things to do.”
“What sort of things?”
At this, my father would lean in, repeat simply, ominously, in very hushed tones, “Things.”

And then, he would smile.

It was the unexpected smile that sold it. If you’re curt and rude you just seem socially inept and boorish. If you smile and are polite as you brush them off, it unsettles them a bit and allows for a graceful get-away. I highly recommend it.

It might help if, like my father, you’re very large and heavily armed and otherwise never say a word, Regardless, I say go for it. If nothing else, maybe politeness itself will be enough to confuse them.