Bettie Page Monkey Christmas

Christmas dinner at Larry's tonight. Monkeys riding on dogs came up! Lee Durkee had seen them (monkeys riding dogs) during the half-time show of a Cincinnati Bengals game, I think. (PS Do you live in Cincinnati? I'm giving a reading there in the new year! I wanted to stay at the hotel where Kelly Hogan and Bill Taft and I stayed together in 1992, and I played piano in the bar all night, but that hotel doesn't exist anymore. So I guess it is okay to mention that Bill peed off the balcony.) Melissa Ginsburg perked up at the mention of monkeys riding dogs! So I mentioned my serious misgivings about monkeys riding dogs. Chris Offutt, to soothe my mind, said that maybe monkeys were the photographers of monkeys riding dogs, and I said "Then those were Bettie Page monkeys, being exploited by monkey photographers." So Chris looked on his phone and found this photo of Bettie Page with a chimp (not a monkey, mind you!). Then we ate dinner and somebody made a big deal about how Robert Johnson couldn't possibly have sold his soul to the devil and I was like, what, Robert Johnson TOTALLY sold his soul to the devil! So that was dinner. Yeah, I was a jerk all night, I kept taking the other side of everything, like a jerk.