Duckie Wow knew it wasn’t everybody’s dream job, but he liked it, and was good at it too.  None, absolutely none, of the Empire State Building postcards sold in the Big Apple depicted a giant ape swatting at bi-planes, so for a nickel apiece Duckie painted one in. They sold great!

Rainbow apes for the Pride parade, green ones for Saint Pat’s. He painted them all, big batch or small, for any occasion in every corner of the city no matter how obscure. 

Time marched on, as it does, and both of Duckie’s hands fell off. “Too much ape painting”, the

doctors said. But then even at only a nickel a clip he was a millionaire. Sure, it would have been easy enough to have some computer thing do the work now, but that didn’t feel right  to Duckie.

He did the honorable thing and hired monkeys to do the work. Not all, but enough ofthe monkeys were decent painters. This allowed the company to expand and to do fairs, and festivals, even have a few permanent locations. The most successful one was at Niagara Falls, right next to the wax museum. For five bucks newlyweds could get their portraits painted on the Mighty Kong’s butt.

Doug Mathewson