I was warming up with a couple of team-mates. We were all coloured and there were monkey chants. There were about 10 of them doing it. I didn’t know what to do. It had never happened to me before. I told my coach and he went mad.
I suffered racial abuse in Lithuania, and in two games the fans were making monkey noises and throwing coins at me.
Postwar America was a very buttoned-up nation. Radio shows were run by censors, Presidents wore hats, ladies wore girdles. We came straight out of the blue – nobody was expecting anything like Martin and Lewis. A sexy guy and a monkey is how some people saw us.
Wearing a monkey suit really lets you know where you stand as an actor.
When I was a kid, all I knew about Michael Jackson was that he was crazy. He had a monkey named Bubbles and some kind of oxygen chamber, and he used to be black, but he made himself white, and he was nuts. That was Michael Jackson in full. Wacko Jacko.
Most girls are taught to avoid risk and failure. We’re taught to smile pretty, play it safe, get all A’s. Boys, on the other hand, are taught to play rough, swing high, crawl to the top of the monkey bars, and then just jump off headfirst.
There are domains in which expertise is not possible. Stock picking is a good example. And in long-term political strategic forecasting, it’s been shown that experts are just not better than a dice-throwing monkey.
Just cause you got the monkey off your back doesn’t mean the circus has left town.
I swear by that old expression, ‘One monkey don’t stop no show!’ The reality is, we still have some good men out there, and we should hail those men as the kings they are.
I started making monkey bridges, like kids do, and climbing and rappelling with ropes. Very naturally, I needed some knots. At the very beginning, I didn’t care, I didn’t know, and then slowly I started to know, and I started to care. I wanted to know more knots or the right knot for the special action.
A father and two sons run Adelphia. It’s a cable company. And they took from that company a billion dollars. A billion. Three people – three people took a billion dollars. What were they gonna do, start their own space program? ‘Let’s send the monkey to Mars, Dad!’
In Africa, you know, if you’re poor, at least you can go to the forest and share some mangoes with the gorillas and monkey.
The newly released movie ‘Noah’ features a retelling of the creation story that clearly depicts Darwinian evolution transforming a single-cell organism into a monkey. The movie also seems to show magic in scenes more reminiscent of the occult than of the Bible story.
It wasn’t until a few years ago, when I was going through old Facebook pictures with a friend, and happened upon a photo of a monkey at a zoo that had been tagged as me by an old housemate, that I realized I’d normalized so much racism.
I was Boots The Monkey in ‘Dora The Explorer Live Dora’s Pirate Adventure,’ and it was the greatest!
I’m sorry, I’m not a performing monkey.
‘Friend Monkey’ is really my favorite of all my books because the Hindu myth on which it is based is my favorite – the myth of the Monkey Lord who loved so much that he created chaos wherever he went.
My roots are in music. But Eileen Ford saw my high school graduation picture, and next thing I knew I was on a plane to New York. That’s what threw a monkey wrench in it. The modeling.
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