Green Monkeys

Monkeys don’t appreciate being dressed as Leprechauns.

A bit back I mentioned as a kid we had a red macaque named Porky who wasn’t a terribly big fan of Christmas in general and Christmas trees in particular. The little turd had a pretty nasty temper too when he didn’t want to do something and any article of clothing, from the diapers we cut a hole in for his stub tail and tried to get him to wear to the silly little booties, just did rubbed him the wrong way, and he didn’t hesitate to let us know it. Monkey screeching is not a pleasant thing, as I have said, though at least this time none of our nosy neighbors called in the cops to investigate the noises.

Well, being the clever (translation: dense) little kid I was, I somehow got the bright idea dressing Porky up for St. Paddy’s Day as a good idea. (Hey the monkey did have red fur and a little red fanny, so he might have been a wee bit Irish and at the time I didn’t know they had no monkeys in Ireland…) Wasn’t hard to find a nice little green cardboard Irish hat—they came on perforated sheets and had little tabs you taped together. He fit in some of the larger doll clothes but my mother used to knit so she made him a green sweater. The black shorts were harder to come by, but we found some somewhere I can’t recall exactly.

As you might have guessed the whole Lucky Charms Monkey thing went over like a nun in a brothel. No luck ‘o the Irish where Porky was concerned. The hat lasted probably three or four seconds before he shredded it in protest. And those pants? They weren’t going on no how. After a bit of monkey screeching—ok, a lot of monkey screeching—and a bit of twisting, spitting and biting (and that was just from my mother! Nah, not really.) the bottomless monkey won out. Maybe I should have tried a kilt…

He did tolerate the sweater for a little while. But alas monkeys will have no part of deodorant, either, and he didn’t smell all that good to begin with. An hour in that sweater and he was a pretty rank little bugger. He learned he could pull strings from the sweater and unravel parts of it, which became problematic because apparently monkeys are not fond of snakes and a few trailing green strings…

Took awhile to get him down from the top of the cabinets and cut first the strings, then the remainder of the sweater off his furry red hide.

He did like the marshmallows in Lucky Charms, though, so I’m still thinking he had a bit of Irish in there somewhere, though looking back I am sure glad I didn’t think of giving him a shillelagh…