A Day at the Zoo c.1982

We’re new to the Tahoe area, having moved recently from Colorado. So towards the end of our second year in Nevada, I find the time to take the family for a long weekend in San Francisco.

At the San Francisco Zoo, I drift away from my family to concentrate on some photography. My shooting is interrupted by my 6 year-old son who excitedly comes running over to me, saying, “Dad, come quick. The monkeys are throwing poop!”

I don’t hesitate. I’m right behind him. Running.

An angry orangutan is pooping into his hand and then heaving it over his enclosure’s fence at the crowd. An obnoxious, red-haired teenaged girl begins mocking the monkey, but he’s having none of it, and readies another grenade.

The rest of the crowd is clustered tightly together in a semi-circle about ten yards in front of the enclosure, on the human side of the fence, but the red-haired girl is out in front of all of us, and she’s leaning-in towards the monkey yelling, getting him worked-up. Without so much as a windup, the “pitcher” throws, improbably landing a messy, disgusting blob of wet, gooey orangutan poo right into her curly head of hair.

The crowd — like the gathered townspeople in some old western movie — makes a collective sort of shock and awe noise, while instantaneously backing away from the girl’s “space.”

An angry zookeeper comes out through a gate in the fence, and gets in front of the crowd, yelling at all of us to leave the monkey alone. The show is over. We move on.