On Saturday evening, my friend Stacey and I were having drinks at her apartment, gurgling and giggling idiotically amongst ourselves in a high pitched of frenzied fancy. Our topic was monkeys. *
After several hours of monkey-centric conversation, Stacey dropped this bombshell.
"When I was in school, my professor told me about this Victorian hat craze. It apparently became fashionable at a certain point for ladies to wear wide brimmed hats, on top of which tiny monkeys lived. But because no one wanted a tiny chattering monkey crapping all over their fashionable hat, they wouldn't feed the monkeys: they'd just starve to death. Ladies would replace their monkeys once a week. By the end of the London season? This entire species of monkey had been made extinct."
My eyes lit up. Oh, I knew the story was too good to be true: how is a monkey crapping on your hat any less disturbing than a week spent enduring its shrieking starvation cries? Still, Stacey was emphatic that she had actually been told this by a reputable professor. It was 2am: we immediately woke several of her old classmates up, demanding that they groggily corroborate. No one remembered the story. We even spent an hour combing Google for corroboration. By the time we were ready to admit defeat, we'd exhausted all possible search terms, including "Lady Monkey No Crap Hat."
I'm still not willing to let this go, though. I knew I had one last recourse: if anyone in the world knows whether or not such a hat existed, that individual would be amongst the readers of ToM.
So I'm begging you guys. Can anyone corroborate the existence of the Lady Monkey No Crap Hat? Better yet, can anyone find a picture? I can offer nothing except my undying adoration and a slice of equity from my new Internet startup, ladymonkeynocraphat.com.
* - I had started the conversation by relating the few scant details I could recollect about the seminally stupid Congo. First, I told her about the part where gigantic man-eating hippopotamuses attack an explorer's raft; at one point, flying into the gaping maw of a hippo, an extra is clearly heard to scream, "I knew this was going to happen!" I also informed Stacey that there was a chimpanzee in this movie with robot arms; these arms could be used to audibly communicate with humans in American Sign Language.
"That's a hell of a monkey," Stacey remarked.
"It is, but chimpanzees apparently aren't the engrossing conversationalists you'd imagine." I replied. "As I recall, this chimpanzee spends most of the movie signing things like 'Amy Need Hug'."
But I digress.
