— Fran Lebowitz
A while ago, three women sued their former boss. Why? She wanted them to expose their breasts to a gorilla.
I know. Makes you just blink and go, “What?”
This banana-throwing case started when two women quit the Gorilla Foundation. Founded in 1976 to preserve, understand and promote things gorilla-ish, it’s based in Northern California, up in Woodside.
It seems the women’s supervisor — a woman herself — asked the gals to lift their softball jerseys in sororal spirit so that Koko, a girl gorilla, could see their breasts.
Koko is the world-famous gorilla who is smarter than both houses of Congress and all of Obama’s czars and has a larger vocabulary than Al Gore. The creature can communicate using more than 1,000 different signs.
Francine Patterson — and dear me, I hope it’s not my attorney’s sister — is the president of GF. She was accused of repeatedly telling workers Nancy Alperin and Kendra Keller to let their womanhood flap unfettered in the cool NorCal breeze. The reason? Koko asked them to. Later, Koko allegedly asked a third woman worker, Iris Rivera, to show off her Hostess Snowballs. The boss said the gesture would help the women bond better with the 300-pound gorilla-ette.
Boy. Could I have used that line in high school.
“Show me your breasts. It will help us bond.”
Blur of cheerleader fist. Blood spurting out my nose 15-feet in the air in Sam Peckinpah slow motion. Room spinning. Everything goes dark.
What makes none of this work is that there is not a guy anywhere to be seen.
You could run wild with chauvinism, sexist, male lout jokes.
But no.
We’re dealing with four women and a girl gorilla. Five females. Ten nipples. There’s no place to go. A woman asks three other women to show their breasts to yet another woman. And the latter is a few rungs down the evolutionary ladder. Well. Not counting the politically correct in the Muslim nation of Sweden or the entire population of Palmdale.
I’d like to say I’m mystified why the three women didn’t just take the rare, higher, common sense route instead of suing.
Maybe this is just me, but if someone asked me to show my breasts or anything else projecting from my body to a big hairy giant ape, I’d probably consider the request for a moment, blink, then respond:
“No.”
I surely wouldn’t start flailing about, back of my hand velcroed to forehead, knocking over mail boxes and pretending to be mentally damaged beyond all repair because the King Kong version of Jane Goodall elbowed me and suggested: “Flash the monkey.”
I’ve got a few friends who are not “hearing challenged.”
They’re deaf.
Next time I see them, I’m going to ask:
“How do you say, ‘Show me your pompons’ in sign language?”
You never can tell. Next time you’re at the gorilla cage, or at a deaf cheerleader convention, it could come in handy.
John Boston was named Best Humor Columnist in America by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. Again. This goes along with his 117 other major national, regional and California awards for writing excellence. Look for his new web page, thebostonreport.com, coming soon.
