When my daughter, Clementine, was a baby, her grandmother sent her an ugly little stuffed gorilla. Not content with just being ugly, this gorilla also sang “The Macarena.” (And you thought that the kiss of death for that song was delivered in 1996 when Al Gore danced to it at the Olympics. It just goes to show you that, no matter how low something or someone has gone, it is always possible to break out the shovel and go a little bit lower. Case in point: O.J.)
Not that this particular toy could go much lower itself: not only was it ugly and stuck with one of the World’s Most Annoying Songs (top honors for that still go to “If I Said You Had A Beautiful Body Would You Hold It Against Me”); but, for some reason it also stank like it had been dipped into a vat of kerosene. (It was this, together with the fact that it had been purchased at a truck stop, that made me suspect that the original purpose of “The Macarena Monkey” had been as the cover cargo for a shipment of Columbian cocaine. Yes, I believe that the monkey was a mule.)
By now you’re probably wondering why, if the Macarena Monkey was so ugly, grating, and above all smelly, did we keep it. The most obvious answer to that question is that it was a Grandma present, and you are statutorily required to keep all presents from mothers and grandmothers for at least one full calendar year, but the truth is that we kept it because of Clementine. Not because she loved it, mind you, but because she was terrified of it: the first few “hey-na-na-na-na’s” alone were enough to send her whimpering out of the room. This meant that the monkey was finally able to do what we never could: scare her straight.
Before the monkey, we were powerless over Clementine’s recalcitrance: if we told her to stay away from the wood stove, she made a beeline for it; if we told her to leave the outlets alone, she picked up a fork; and if we warned her away from the toilet bowl cleaner, she went to get her sippy cup. With the advent of the Macarena Monkey, however, she was suddenly biddable. All we had to do was hide the monkey behind the stove or underneath the sink (wherever she had been forbidden from), and then wait for the inevitable disobedience: as soon as she got near enough, the (motion-activated) monkey would, like some all-seeing emissary of divine judgement, launch into his song, sending Clementine scuttling away in terrified compliance. It was great. (Although, in retrospect, I wonder if her current disdain for anything even remotely associated with cleaning can be traced to some “toilet bowl cleaner aversion therapy” that went a bit too far).
Eventually, of course, the Macarena Monkey went the way of all flesh (and plush), and we had to come up with other, less successful methods for securing her compliance. Many is the time that I have mourned the loss of the monkey; in fact, I was beginning to doubt whether we would ever find its equal, when recently I realized that the replacement has been right under my nose for five years. He doesn’t smell quite as bad (at least not usually), and as of yet Al Gore has not danced to one of his songs, but the look of horror on Clementine’s face when she watches her five year-old brother, Clyde, dance naked across the living room is the spitting image of her long ago look of terror while watching the Monkey. Now if I could only find some way to make his image appear every time she left her bed unmade or tried to sneak a popsicle out of the kitchen, all my problems would be solved.