Madden's Flipping Little Monkey

This guy looks nothing like Madden's Flipping Little Monkey, but I couldn't resist posting this picture of Wonder Woman's Monkey Wedding (note that Wonder Woman is a PEZ dispenser).

(photo from Flickr by monoglot)

Most of my dreams I either forget without thinking about them or I choose to forget. For whatever reason, I had a dream sequence last night that I tried hard not to forget, mainly for its possibilities as a stream-of-consciousness blog post.

I call it "Madden's Flipping Little Monkey" because that's the image I could hold on to most easily.

The story takes place at a theme park called "Wabash Heaven", sort of a cross between Disney-MGM and the Cuba Gooding movie "What Dreams May Come", although it's set in downstate Indiana.

One of the attractions (or perhaps the whole park) involves the guest moving from situation to situation while doing impressions of famous people. I know I did Walter Cronkite at one point. The scenes change in synch with whatever's in the player's head.

Boom!

Here's helpful announcer /pitchman /commissioner John Madden.

I can't recount the progression, but am some point I was doing John Madden in the football announcing booth, playing with a plastic toy monkey. In my best combination of his football commentary and Ace Hardware styles, I demonstrated both the fun and the usefulness of the toy, which when activated, would flip, landing either head down or head up at random.

"Boom!" I cried Madden-like as the monkey landed. "Just kidding, this toy is completely safe." Made in China, each monkey comes with either a personal letter from the Premier of China stating that no lead was used in the paint or a CD single of Sting's new toy-safety anthem "Unleaded." My impression of Sting singing the song was mercifully brief.

"The thought of lead/All parents dread/Unsafe for girls and boys/

Oh Chinese head/Use tin instead/We all need unleaded toys!"

From this scene I became NFL Commissioner Madden, unveiling the Madden Little Flipping Monkey as the replacement for the commemorative coin to be used in the "coin flip" to start the Super Bowl, and in fact all NFL games. The move would solve the epidemic problem of the sides of commemorative coins being misidentified. (This actually happened in one Super Bowl.)



The announcement was met with great concern by executive director of the American Commemorative Coin Marketers' Association (ACCMA), who with great passion and seriousness argued for the continued use of commemorative coins in this service, warning of the dire consequences of such a change for the commemorative coin industry (CCI). "The CCI will produce a coin that cannot be misidentified," he pledged. "Technology can be implanted in the coin so that it will call out "heads " or "tails" as soon as it lands, eliminating the possibility of misidentification."

Commissioner Madden, now appearing in one of those monitor-based discussions on CNN, assured Mr ACCMA that a commerative coin would still be produced for every game, just not used for the captain's meeting. Whatever technology that could be added to the coin just couldn't make it as much fun as that "flipping little monkey." Programming for the Madden08 video game had already been modified to include a monkey flip instead of a coin flip. At this point, Larry King asked the director to pull up the game on one of the monitors and we watched the monkey flipping over and over to the delight of Madden and King and the dismay of Mr. ACCMA, who covered his head with his arms. When all this jollity concluded, Madden announced that his next act as Commissioner will be to rename the replay official the "Helpful Replay Man."

The "Helpful Replay Man"

I hung on to these images for another three or so hours of sleep (I may have made up a few this morning--particularly the appearance of Larry King), thinking "Madden's Flipping Little Monkey" over and over like counting sheep.