!SUNDAY, September 30, 1990
GREENVILLE, MISSISSIPPI
King Kong, eat your heart out ‘Cheetah never had it so good. And Mighty Joe Young, get a life!
These expressions, and many others, may very well convey the attitudes of the David D. Duggins’ family. The New Orleans attorney and his family visited Greenville on the way to Oxford for the Tulane-Ole Bliss football game. Their mode of travel is Monkeyshines, a banana yellow Cadillac Manhattan limousine complete with multicolored monkeys decorating its chassis.
The car — lacking a more descriptive term; somehow, Banana Boat just doesn’t fit — was custom painted by New Orleans artist Stella Farwell, a former carnival queen.
Duggins said Farwell had peeled II dla gr.aroPiged:IVetZlirei Cadillac so Farwell could demonstrate her Biter for monkey business.
Fartvell, along with partner Gail Blank, heads Art Cars of New Orleans, which now specializes in decorative car painting. In fact, Monkeyshines has been entered in Art Car shows and will appear in an upcoming movie about art cars. The segment of the film that features Monkeyshines has already been recorded, Duggins said.
Considering gas prices, one might wonder if the primate-powered pedal-pumper runs off banana daiquiris. Duggins said he had an encounter with the Greenville SWAT team Thursday night after running a red light.
“Actually, the light was changing,” Duggins said. “But I didn’t want to throw everybody around by slamming on the brakes, so I went through.”
Duggins said he was immediately stopped by four camouflage-wearing police officers — gorilla warriors, no doubt — who wore hoods and had their machine guns ready. Of course, an official within the Greenville Police Department disavowed any knowledge of the encounter, indicating it was probably a UFO: unsubstantiated four-flushed observation.
Still, Duggins said the encounter was pleasant. “They couldn’t have been nicer,” he said.
Duggins and his family have had a lot of fun monkeying around in the limo. But he said he and his wife have become weary of going ape every time someone asks for an explanation. So, when they return to New Orleans, the car will be painted diplomat blue.
Meanwhile, they will visit the monkey bars for banana cocktails … wait, that’s not right.
Meanwhile, they will endure people staring at the bananas that seem to be growing from the license plate. One might suppose the family also will endure guffaws from all sorts of madcap punsters who try to justify their sickness of normality by ridiculing those who have a greater passion for the absurd. Whew!
Anyway, the Duggins are just fun-loving people who claim that Farwell is just plain weird. The combination has proven to be more potently amusing than a barrel of half-witted monkeys.