Monkey Sister - Tooth & Claw

What if your sister -- the one your parents raised you with, the one that shared your toys -- what if she didn’t just have different hair, or a slightly different nose, but was an entirely different species altogether? Hannah Friedman experiences the Law of the Jungle firsthand in the (dis)comfort of her family home. STORIES Monkey Sister A huge thank you to Hannah Friedman https://www.hannahfriedman.com and her parents Alison Pascoe & Dean Friedman for sharing their story with Snap! Hannah https://www.instagram.com/thehannahfriedman/?hl=en is a tv and film writer, producer and composer based in Los Angeles. To find out more about her life growing up with Amelia the monkey, check out Hannah’s memoir “Everything Sucks” https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Sucks-Losing-Finding-Myself/dp/0757307752?ref_=ast_author_mpb Produced by Bo Walsh, edited by Regina Bediako, original score by Renzo Gorrio. Photo by Robin Schwartz. The Gift Horse Tim Snyder thought he knew horses. He’d been around horses his entire life. Then he was introduced to a disabled horse that completely changed his life. Thanks Tim for sharing your story! Check out Tim's book "The Ghost Horse" https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-ghost-horse-joe-layden/1113938086?ean=9781250048646 Produced by Anna Sussman, sound design by Renzo Gorrio. Season 17 - Episode 3 Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices https://dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:07Glynn Washington?

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• 2:29Glynn Washington?

  I had a friend and we planned to go to dinner. I made the reservations. I wear the nice jacket. I knock on my door and she answers. Tear eye. She said she's so, so, so sorry, but she can't go out as planned. Oh, no. What's the matter? Everything all right? Well, she says, Snookums is sad. Snookums? Snookums, my rat. I don't know. He's just having attachment issues right now. I don't think it's fair to leave him here alone. I said, oh, you know, I understand. I do, you know, with the rats and such. Really? Sure. Absolutely.

• 3:14Glynn Washington?

  But I should, you know, should probably get going right away. Right away, quick. Oh, you don't have to. We could. Oh, no, no, no. I think I do. I hope Snookums and y'all, y'all feel better. But and with the rapid steps, I flee. My friends later at the bar howl and laughter, call me terrible names. Now, no. I admit, this on me. It is. But I kind of think like, I don't even have a whole lot of rules. I don't truly. I just, I don't know. I don't do rats. Am I a speciesist? Probably. I think I would understand a dog or even a cat. God forbid.

• 3:58Glynn Washington?

  They're part of the family, sure. And accommodations must be made. But what if your other family member isn't a rat? Exactly. But still has the gall to think that mom and dad like her best. Today on Snap Judgment's Tooth and Claw Series, we probably present Monkey Sister. My name is John Washington. Personally, I don't believe in pets you can call the exterminator on. When you're listening, to Snap Judgment. Snap.

• 4:35Glynn Washington?

  Now, there's an old saying you sometimes see on Hallmark cards and coffee mugs that says, sisters are like different flowers from the same garden. Lovely. Things might have been a little bit different at the Friedman home in upstate New York, where the firstborn Hannah, she was still trying to figure out her place in the family pecking order. Snap judgment.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  Amelia knew how much I loved peanut butter. And sometimes she would run her fingers through it in front of me and she would just make eye contact with me as her little paw claw was running its way through the peanut butter. And then she would lick it off of her fingers, one by one, as she was making deep eye contact with me. I would just shiver. It was so gross to me. And I would say, Mom, please, can I have my own special peanut butter? Can we hide it? Can we keep it in a different cabinet? And my mom would say, well, she likes peanut butter, too. So my sister's name was Amelia. But the strange thing about my sister is that she was not a human. She was a monkey. She was a capuchin monkey.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  She's like the monkey on Friends or the monkey from Indiana Jones. She has dark brown fur and she has such an expressive face. She really is like a little mini-human. And she probably weighed about seven pounds, I'd say, about the size of a house cat. I was the firstborn human, but my mom had this monkey who preceded me.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  I had had Amelia six years before I had a baby. I'm a zoologist and I've worked with many different types of animals, training them. I was a veterinary technician at the time as well. I was working in a laboratory, looking at the well-being of the animals that were there. And Fish and Wildlife called us. They had a capuchin monkey that had been brought in on a merchant marine ship from Egypt that they didn't know what to do with. She was very into coins and cigarettes. And that's usually a mark that the animals were used in market squares to entertain people. She was very malnourished and she was basically really scared of people.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  And then the bond was very, very close when she learned to trust me.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  I started taking her home on the weekends. And then I started taking her home all the time. And then when I decided to leave the program, I just decided to take her. She would have a much better life with me than in the program. So basically, I just brazenly took her. When I got her, she had many teeth taken out by her previous owners. And that was another reason I was able to keep her. And that was another reason that she did not go into a sanctuary, which is usually the best place for a monkey to go. She was so sick, I thought she was just gonna pass the first year that I got her. But when I started her on medication, she became stronger and she became a really solid monkey.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  I realized that she's around for a while.

• 7:55Speaker 03

  Did she feel like a first child?

• 7:58Speaker 02

  Yes. She was very much like a baby. I took her everywhere with me. I was always aware of where she was. There was a lot of messes to clean up. So when I finally had Hannah, it wasn't that much different.

• 8:14Speaker 03

  Was your husband reluctant at all about having Amelia with a baby?

• 8:20Speaker 02

  Oh, no, not at all. She was so sweet with babies and with children.

• 8:25Speaker 04

  No qualms at all, because she had already proven herself to be very discerning about infants and was always super gentle with them and attentive. So, yeah, there were no real concerns at all.

• 8:41Speaker 02

  She would sit with her in the crib. The two of them were wonderful together. They really, really enjoyed each other a lot.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  She would groom my hair, and she taught me how to pick things up with my feet.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  They got fed at the same time, and they played with the same toys.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  I felt like I had this incredible playmate, because we would...

• 9:05Speaker 01

  Make a mess together. We would eat a bunch of oatmeal and throw it all over the table. We would play. You could kind of wrestle with her and throw across the room and she would rush back. And she's so athletic, so she could climb to the top of a banister in one second and leap around the house. And it was so fun. And I never felt unsafe around her. It was great growing up with this monkey.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Hannah really couched it as being a sibling. I'd never really thought of it in terms of a sibling. That's Hannah's take on it.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  She literally ate my homework and I had to go to the school psychologist because when I said that, the teacher didn't know that I was telling the truth. And I was so frustrated that they didn't believe me, that I started crying and screaming, that they had to believe me. My monkey sister was real. My sister really was a monkey. I didn't think of her as a pet. She was a member of the family.

• 10:02Speaker 04

  She just insinuated herself into our household. She was just like a little hairy kid.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  At first in elementary school, it was so cool to have a monkey as a sister. Everyone's dream is to play with a monkey. So people would want to come over to my house and I would have all my toys set up and dolls and things that I wanted to play, games and puzzles. And nobody gave a shit about any of that because there's a monkey.

• 10:31Speaker 02

  She was very jealous of the monkey sometimes because a lot of people wanted to come over and see the monkey and not hang out and play in her room.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  The minute they knew that I had a monkey as a sister, that's all they wanted to know about. Where did she come from? What is her name? What is she like? What does she eat? Does she poop and throw it at people?

• 10:50Speaker 02

  Amelia was somewhat of a celebrity around the neighborhood and she had been in a movie called Monkey Shines.

• 10:59Speaker 05

  Monkey Shines, an experiment in fear.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  So my mom was part of this monkey entertainment enterprise. And there was a movie called Monkey Shines, directed by George Romero. They actually came to my mom and asked if she could help advise them on how to be able to do some of these shots.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  So I said, I'll do it. Someone's gonna do it. I know how to do it, and I'll make sure that it's done humanely.

• 11:29Speaker 06

  So you train monkeys?

• 11:30Speaker 05

  An animal trained to follow commands.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  So who could possibly do all the complex tricks that are required for this role? Amelia was so talented, she could do all these things. She could like do a Rubik's Cube, and this monkey could do everything that they could imagine and more. She was killing it, and it was exactly what they wanted.

• 11:53Speaker 06

  She's unbelievable. She's like a miniature person.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  The money from the movie provided the down payment for our house. So it was really the house that Amelia bought.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  And she'd been on television from David Letterman.

• 12:09Speaker 07

  What kind of monkey is Amelia?

• 12:10Speaker 02

  She's a capuchin monkey.

• 12:12Speaker 07

  Capuchin monkeys. These, I know a little bit about, they're very, very intelligent, aren't they?

• 12:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:17Speaker 07

  And they can be trained to do amazing things, as we've already witnessed.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  And Amelia was famous for a while.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  Things started to shift when I realized how popular Amelia was, and also how little she had to do to garner so much attention. I would get a good grade on my spelling report, okay, great job. But Amelia would eat spaghetti with her feet, and everyone would lose their mind with how amazing and hilarious it was, and like, let's see it again. Please, please, please, let's take pictures. And I was excited and like proud that my family was so different and unique and strange. But also, sometimes you just want to be normal and be known for the special things about you, and not that you have this weird sister.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  When things really got bad is when I went through puberty.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Kind of overnight, it became really adversarial. And it started really subtly. So she would steal food off of my plate. And I would sort of laugh, but that was weird. She didn't used to do that. Or she would start stealing things from my bag. Or she would swipe at my hair.

• 13:34Speaker 02

  She just started being really mischievous around Hannah.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  At first, it felt not that personal. And, you know, she's a monkey. So she would do things like that every now and then, just to get a kick. She really liked teasing people.

• 13:50Speaker 02

  She wouldn't open Hannah's door. She would bang it open and go running in. Hannah would go, "The monkey, get her out of my room. She's in my room." And I'd say, "Just close the door."

• 14:00Speaker 01

  She knew my favorite kind of lipstick that I got from Sephora, that I saved up for. And I would come home and her mouth would be covered in red goo. And I just knew that she had gotten into my purse and she had eaten it all.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  She was touching something that Hannah didn't want her to have. When Hannah was a child, Hannah could take it away from her. But when Hannah was older, Amelia would scream at her if she tried to take it away.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  I had this perfect slammer holographic pogg. I knew that she knew that I loved it. And I walked in and she was slowly peeling it off. And she slowly continued to peel it as she made eye contact with me. And then I watched as she put it on the floor and then she peed on it.

• 14:40Speaker 02

  She was like, you know, a bad five-year-old. So it was a sibling relationship where the two of them would antagonize each other. So I was constantly separating them, sending them both to their room.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  I kind of just tried to avoid her, which was hard because she was very clever. She would wait until I was most vulnerable. Like, she would wait until I was on the toilet. And she would leap out from behind it, where she had been hiding, lurking in wait. She would hide behind darkened doorways and wait for me to come through. And then she would jump out and bite my Achilles tendon and run away and laugh. It was like living with a goblin.

• 15:18Speaker 02

  If she thought that she could intimidate you, she would. Her whole social system is based on a series of hierarchies. That's how it works in the primate world. And so, men, she didn't have any problem with. But women, I was number one. I was the alpha woman, and she wanted to be number two. So she, all of a sudden, saw Hannah as a challenge, as Hannah was getting older. And she saw her taking her place as number two in the female hierarchy in the house.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  And it just wasn't fair, because I have a younger brother, and she never did this to my brother because of his gender.

• 15:56Speaker 02

  She was never aggressive towards men, ever. And she just accepted him as a male in the troop.

• 16:04Speaker 04

  She was totally submissive to most males. And I was just, you know, happy that I was not the subject of that testing.

• 16:13Speaker 03

  Was there ever a point that you expected this hierarchy issue to come into play with Hannah and Amelia?

• 16:21Speaker 02

  I was not prepared for it. I didn't know that much about capuchin behavior at the time. And she was great with Hannah all through childhood, until Hannah was about 13. And she must have, you know, whatever monkey sensed, she sensed that she was starting to, you know, become an adult. Hannah did not stand her grounds, because she was a little intimidated. And I think she was really surprised.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  The frustrating thing to me is I'd be like, "Mom, tell her not to do that, please." And my mom would say, "I can't. She won't respect you. You have to do it for yourself. You have to challenge her yourself, or she's never going to stop."

• 17:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not like a dog. That's why I would throw my hands up, and I was like, "Well, Hannah, if you're not gonna, if you're not gonna restrain her, then there's nothing I can do for you."

• 17:14Speaker 01

  And I do think that she was right, because every now and then, my mom would say, like, "Don't do that," or "Why would you do that?" And Amelia would look at me like, "Really? You had to go get your mommy to come yell at me?"

• 17:23Speaker 02

  I would lose my patience sometimes, and I would say, "Hannah, you just have to grab her by the shoulders and bring her up to you."

• 17:30Speaker 01

  My mom would coach me, and she would be like... Okay, just when she comes, you're going to look her in the eye. You can't break eye contact. If she scratches you, it doesn't matter. You just have to make sure that you hold eye contact longer than she does. And then, once she breaks eye contact, then you know that you have won the encounter, that you've come out on top.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  She was little. She was six pounds, so it wasn't hard.

• 17:58Speaker 03

  But do you think Hannah, at her age, should have been able to do it?

• 18:02Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I kept telling her to, and I kept saying, "This is what you do." And she wouldn't do it. She just never really wanted to go face to face with her.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  I really did try, and I would talk myself into it. I would try to hype myself up, like, okay, next time she attacks me, I'm just gonna go for it. I'm just gonna do it. It doesn't matter if she's scratching me, I'm just gonna be brave. And I could never do it.

• 18:27Speaker 03

  Did you ever feel like it was unfair for Hannah to have to go through this?

• 18:31Speaker 02

  Oh, God, no. Definitely was not unfair at all. I think Hannah had a lot to do with the fact that they never were on equal level.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  It felt confusing, because I think I blamed myself for being treated this way. So I definitely felt resentment and confusion and a little bit of self judgment, because what's wrong with me that I can't top this monkey?

• 19:01Speaker 02

  I guess I wasn't as reactive to Hannah as I should have been when the monkey was annoying to her, because I felt that Hannah should have taken care of it herself. So that probably caused some tension between the two of us. But it's true, I could not intervene in their relationship.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  I was angry at my mom when I felt like she chose Amelia over me. I do feel like sometimes they were on their own team, and I was the opposing team.

• 19:31Speaker 02

  I also just, you know, I enjoyed being with her. She just couldn't be trusted, that's all. Not Hannah, but the monkey.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  My dad was very much on my side, but he knew he couldn't control the monkey. And I don't think the boys in the house really understood.

• 19:48Speaker 04

  Part of it was kind of funny. It was hard not to laugh at it. It was, I guess, more fascinating than anything else. I never perceived it as a genuine threat.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  I would not want to talk to her or hang out with her, but it was difficult because she was eating dinner with us. So sometimes I would eat dinner in my room. Every now and then, I would imagine, what if she didn't come back? Like, what if the door was open and she wandered off? But I never would have actually enacted that. And she was a family member. So as much as you're annoyed and pissed at someone, you don't want them to disappear. But I definitely imagined scenarios where someone else adopts her

• 20:39Speaker 01

  or like a monkey family comes and picks her up and takes her away to have a monkey life so that she could go play all these Machiavellian monkey games with other monkeys and not with me.

• 20:55Speaker 03

  Was there ever any worry that you might have to remove her from the house?

• 21:00Speaker 02

  No, never. She really couldn't have gone into a colony or a sanctuary. She would have been the bottom of the hierarchy and had a really hard time. And she wouldn't have lived that long. I accepted that this is what it is.

• 21:14Speaker 02

  That if Hannah wasn't going to try to have some sort of an equal relationship with her, then that's what it was. I knew Hannah wasn't going to get hurt. I knew it was going to get better eventually as Hannah grew up. I was not worried about that.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  So it wasn't all conflict, which made it confusing because Amelia would come when I was watching TV with my brother and she would come and snuggle and she would like make little chirp chirp sounds. And it would be like old times. And I would have this really cute best friend. And it was really sweet. I really liked spending time with her and being close to her. And I really miss that. But I always was on defense, just in case.

• 22:07Glynn Washington?

  When we return, the sibling rivalry is in full effect, but it's a different set of rules when your big sister goes by the law of the jungle. Stay tuned.

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• 24:22Glynn Washington?

  Welcome back to Snap Judgment, the monkey sister episode of our Tooth and Claw series, exploring various forms of interspecies communication. Before the break, the Friedman family's pet monkey Amelia was beginning to see teenage daughter Hannah as a threat in the household's social hierarchy. And after being inseparable for years, the relationship has turned downright hostile. Can Hannah get the monkey off her back? Snap Judgment.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  When I was in elementary school, it was cool to have a monkey. But in high school, it started to be kind of weird and ostracizing. And it was less cool and more bizarre. I started to get embarrassed because all the popular girls who I really desperately wanted to hang out with and go shopping with were grossed out by the idea that there was a monkey that like pooped in our hallway all the time. And I just didn't want to be known as the girl who had this monkey because like I'm other things than that also. So I stopped talking about it as much.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  When I started taking darkroom photography in high school, we would take pictures of flowers and trees and objects around the house. And then I did a series of portrait photography of Amelia and my brother. And they were really beautiful portraits because you can see they have such a strong bond. So although they were not a huge part of my portfolio, those were always the photos that people were attracted to and had questions about. And I was reluctant to expand upon that series because obviously I didn't want to be this monkey girl forever and definitely not in a new high school.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  But I also recognized this was an amazing subject. And I was pretty lucky to have something that nobody else in the class had access to.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  There was this guy who took the photography class with me and he was an upperclassman. He was older than me. He was very cool. His name was Adam. And he started to notice these pictures and he wasn't weirded out by her. He didn't think it was gross. He wanted to know more. And I just wanted to know everything about him because he was so dreamy and he was older and he was like a cool stoner.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  Eventually, I had my very first, like, high school, really romantic kiss in the darkroom with him. And then we started dating and it was really wonderful and I was so in love with him. And he would come over to my house and immediately the vibe shifted because I think Amelia could tell that I liked him. And I expected, I had told him and warned him, like, she's really adversarial, she hides behind the toilet, she always is coming for me. And when I introduced him to her, she could not have been nicer. She turned on the charm. She was cooing and rubbing her stomach and going back and forth

• 27:40Speaker 01

  with her head. Like, she was really, really charming to him. And it got to the point where he said, you know, she's not, like, she's not so bad. Like, she's, I don't really know what you're talking about. And it seemed like I was crazy.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  Like, I was exaggerating or being hyperbolic or being overdramatic. She would flirt with him while we were eating. She would offer him food. She would, she would groom his hair. She was so sweet to him and she never did any of the mean stuff to me in front of him. It was like in a movie because I was so surprised by how charming she was. And over his shoulder, so she was looking past him to me, she gave me like a little, uh, little smirk smirk. She knew what she was doing. And I could tell if she could talk, she was sort of saying like, watch this. And I just knew that she was jealous.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  So despite the fact that I feel like she is trying to drive a wedge between us, it's going so well. We say I love you to each other. We are making out in the photography room all the time. We're having the best time. And eventually, over winter break, things get to the point of seriousness with me and Adam where I'm like, I love him, I trust him, I feel really comfortable with him. I think I'm ready. I want to have the sex with him. I want to lose my virginity to him. So I decide to plan this perfectly.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  I want it to go exactly as I envisioned, which is basically the set of some kind of Pride and Prejudice, beautiful experience where there's like candles and soft music. So I get a bunch of tea candles and I have a sex soundtrack that I've been like picking songs out of and burning them off of Napster onto a CD. And I know the perfect timing because my parents are going to be out of the house, across the street at a holiday party. We had the whole house to ourselves and it's just going to be the exact perfect moment.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  I had fixed my door in a way that Amelia couldn't open it. So this was the first time my door was completely locked.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  I bought this princess mosquito netting. So it's suspended above the bed and then down all the way to the floor of the bed was this flowy see-through fabric, like in a honeymoon suite in a tropical resort. Everything is ready. He comes over. My parents go across the street. I put on the special Napster playlist. I light all the candles and, you know, we've been like talking about it and we've been working our way up to this moment in terms of our trust in one another and just in each other's bodies. And we start kissing and it's getting a little bit hot and heavy. And we've never gone like all the way before, but we've gone

• 30:56Speaker 01

  a little bit of the way. So I was giggling. All of a sudden, we hear boom and the door busts open. And I look at the door. There's nobody there where a person would be, but I scan down and it's Amelia and she is hopping mad.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  When you smile or laugh at a monkey, they're pissed because it's like you're challenging them. You're baring your teeth. You're showing your teeth to them, and that's aggressive. She has heard me laughing. She is running around the room and she is furious. And she jumps onto the bed. My boyfriend covers his junk with a pillow because there's a raging monkey running around the room. I cover myself. She has these tiny little claws and they start getting tangled in the mosquito netting because she's like ripping at it. And I take a pillow and I'm shoving her away, but she has herself tangled now, her little hand, in the mosquito netting because it's mesh. It's all these little tiny holes and her little claw is caught in one of them.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  And she's getting more and more agitated and frustrated. She's screaming. I'm like screaming to get her out.

• 32:04Speaker 02

  We were outside and I heard some screaming. Both Hannah and Amelia screamed. So I knew that the two of them were at each other and that I probably had to go in and break it up.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  So as she runs and drags the mosquito netting over the candles, the mosquito netting bursts into flames. And now she's running and she's like a comet trailing this fire behind her. And she's running around the room. She's running over more tea lights. I'm trying to get her out of the room.

• 32:36Speaker 02

  And I went into the house because I knew that Amelia was loose.

• 32:40Speaker 01

  Everyone was terrified. There's smoke. I'm like, am I going to cook this monkey alive? Obviously, all of this is a lot of ruckus and who should appear at the door? But my parents.

• 32:50Speaker 02

  There was netting all over the place and the candle was on the floor.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  It's just a total disaster. Somehow Amelia has freed herself.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  I put out the fire and.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  She looks at my mom like nothing has happened. Amelia jumps on the bed. She takes a shit. Like she's dropping the mic and then she hoots a little triumphantly. And she just strolls on out. And I'll never forget, my dad, he was only there for like half of a second, but I remember him turning and walking away and my boyfriend saying like, "Mr. Friedman?"

• 33:34Speaker 04

  Well, you know.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  And that was absolutely horrifying and humiliating.

• 33:40Speaker 02

  For Hannah, she was, yeah, not really happy about that. And then I had to, you know, tell her she just needs to close the door more and put something in front of it.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  I was so frustrated with her. I think she wanted to ruin my moment. I think she wanted to upstage me, but she definitely wanted to screw things up that I am sure of. And I think Amelia really got what she wanted. I let her win. There was no way that monkey was leaving the house. There was just no way. It made me feel like I have to get the hell out of here. Like I have to get out of this town. I have to get out of this house. Certainly, I just needed to not be defined by this anymore. After college, I moved out of the house to LA. And eventually, after five years in LA, Amelia was slowing down. She was old. She started getting more frail.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  She was sleeping all the time. And we knew it might be coming toward the end.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  My mom would say like, "Do you want to talk to her on the phone? Like maybe hearing your voice would, would remind her to keep alive, to stay alive. Maybe it'll bring her back from the brink."

• 34:50Speaker 02

  For five years, I watched her and I expected her to go any day.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  I was used to having my mom call and say, "This is it. This is it. Say goodbye." And so she did it another time. "This is it. Say goodbye." She was like, "No, this one, really, it is, it is." Amelia had stopped eating and stopped being interested in water. And I think she knew that it might be time for the end. And she made an appointment. And I think it was really hard for my mom because she loved Amelia so much.

• 35:20Speaker 02

  But when you watch a loved one slowly disintegrate over a period of years, you're ready.

• 35:27Speaker 02

  You know, it's like, OK.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  She went to sleep that night, knowing the next morning she was going to take her in. And then that night Amelia passed away in her arms in bed.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  She lived probably what would have been to 90s in human age. But I have to say that when she passed, I was ready. You know, it was time for her to go. And I'd also had her for 33 years. She was a huge part of my life.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  After Amelia passed away, my mom always knew that she wanted her to have a dignified funeral, like Princess Diana.

• 36:03Speaker 02

  Well, after, I actually had her in the freezer until the funeral the next day. But when she died, you know, I wanted to do something. She was part of the family. Everyone we knew across the decades was affected by her death. So I thought it seemed great and a way to close this chapter of her life and my life.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  My mom arranged an open casket funeral, and there is footage of it, and it's so weird.

• 36:34Speaker 08

  Every time it rains and rains, there's pennies from heaven.

• 36:42Speaker 02

  And I thought she'd look good with a smoking jacket in the open coffin.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  She's clutching lilacs. My mom put lilacs in her hands. And there are bananas arranged as if they were Viking oars on either side of her coffin.

• 37:00Speaker 02

  So I just thought it was a very regal send-off.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  My mom commissioned a portrait artist to make this beautiful portrait of her. And people paid their respects, and everyone in my family, people in the town, some of my ex-boyfriends came.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  Everyone was so delighted to get to know a monkey close up that, you know, it really, you know, it was very, very touching to know that so many people cared about her over the years.

• 37:28Speaker 01

  I was sad because it's such a big part of my life and my story and my family. And I was also really sad for my mom because she was such a constant companion for my mom. And I was also relieved. It was a complicated feeling.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  I hadn't thought about her in years and I stopped mentioning her and I was swiping on Hinge and I was swiping through dudes and I had been on so many bad dates and like kissed so many frogs and been on, been in a lot of unsatisfying relationships and I saw a picture of a handsome man with a monkey on his shoulder, a capuchin monkey, the same kind as Amelia. And I was like, I gotta swipe right. He has a monkey. And not only did I swipe right, but I super swiped because of the monkey. I didn't even think twice about it. I was just like, wow, gotta give that to him. And that's my husband now.

• 38:28Speaker 01

  Part of me thinks that some, in some weird way beyond the grave, that this was, maybe this was her giving me a message or like making up for all the monkey business and all the shenanigans. Like she did, she did make good in the end. And it makes me kind of emotional and tear up thinking about it because I just can hear her laughing. Like I just know that even beyond the grave, that old bitch is laughing and she had the last laugh. And I thought that I had outlived her and outlasted her. And she's like, I bought the house and I got you your husband. Ha, ha, ha, ha.

• 39:22Glynn Washington?

  A huge, huge thank you to Hannah Friedman, as well as her parents, Alison Pascoe and Dean Friedman, for sharing their story with The Snap. Hannah is a TV and film writer, producer and composer based in Los Angeles. And to find out more about her life growing up with Amelia the Monkey, check out Hannah's memoir, Everything Sucks. You can find a link to it at our website, snapjudgment.org. The original score for that piece is by Ruzo Gorio. It was edited by Regina Berriaco and produced by Bo Walsh.

• 40:01Glynn Washington?

  Now, after the break, our magical horse, of course. Inside of Judgment continues. Stay tuned.

• 40:20Glynn Washington?

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• 41:00Glynn Washington?

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• 41:44Glynn Washington?

  and believe as you choose, so long as you don't harm others. Through film screenings, speaking engagements, and valuable resources like the Know Your Rights and Public School Guides, AU empowers people nationwide to recommit to the separation of church and state, protecting individual freedoms and strengthening our democracy for all. Freedom without favor and equality without exception. Learn more at au.org/TENC.

• 42:18Glynn Washington?

  Welcome back to Snap Judgment. My name is Tim Washington. Now, when you want to hear from a loved one on the other side, the signs can be confusing. How do you know if you're seeing what you think you're seeing? Well, Tim Snyder, he took things into his own hands. Snap Judgment.

• 42:44Speaker 09

  I was born in Scarborough, Maine. Specifically, I was born in the grandstand at Scarborough Downs as a racetrack. My dad was a jockey and my grandfather was a trainer. And so I started at the racetrack real early age. Horse has been my, my whole life. The racetrack's a pretty rough place. It's a hard life, you know? I broke my tailbone. I broke my neck. Actually, I'm crippled right now from horses. I love horses. I like being outdoors. I don't believe I could work in a building. Like this building I'm in right now, I couldn't, I don't think, believe I could, I could deal with it, being, being inside. I'm an outdoors person, always have been.

• 43:28Speaker 09

  Well, the first time I, I met Lisa was I ran over her, believe it or not, with a horse. I was on a runaway horse. Well, the horse, he would break, he would break off with you and just take off at a dead run. And I hollered up ahead to Lisa, I didn't even know her name was Lisa at the time. She fell to the wall, her horse got loose, and my horse ran out of the barn up and, across the street and ran up into another barn. I went back across the street to make sure Lisa was all right, because the horse did knock her down, and she was fine. I guess it was about a week after that, we were kind of like inseparable. It was pretty wild. We got married, a year later, we decided to get married.

• 44:13Speaker 09

  Lisa was a very attractive, very outgoing, do anything for anybody. She was just an unbelievable person. She was just, I could never, I never found a fault in her, you know? She was a great person. Lisa loved horses, would do anything, she could do anything. Some of the worst horses I've had that were real rough horses, she just got along with them. Thinking she could have a horse eat right out of her hands, in a couple of days, you know? She could, she could really change a horse. A lot of people always, always used to say, "What, I don't know what they, she sees in you, Timmy." It's hard to meet somebody like that, you know? Think the same, do the same, you know what I mean? Have the same ideas.

• 44:56Speaker 09

  Lisa and I were in business together with the race horses. Man and wife team. I hauled horses up throughout the country. She more or less did the training when I was out of town. Lisa wanted to keep every horse that I bought. You had to buy them, you had to sell them, you couldn't get attached to them. I've had probably four or 500 horses from bought and sold. I used to have to take my horses to other farms and never let her see the ones that I would buy. Because she wanted to keep them all. We were married about, yeah, we were married 10 years. We were in Columbus, Ohio, at Beulah Park racetrack, and she got a real bad pain in her back.

• 45:40Speaker 09

  She had expressions on her face that I've never seen before, and I knew it was serious. And I just told her, "Look Lisa, we're going home tonight." She had cancer. It's a miserable disease, I'll tell you. Late stages of when she was sick, towards the end, she used to always comfort her mother and me, that she would, "Don't worry that, that she was gonna, she was gonna be back." And she was coming back as a horse. It's kinda crazy how all this happened, but she said, "I'm gonna be back. I'm coming back as a horse. I'll be back."

• 46:20Speaker 09

  After my wife passed away, I sold all my horses. I traveled the whole country. I was kinda like, kinda lost, you know? I don't know if I was running from it, or whatever. And then, I eventually went back to Finger Lakes. I had it in the back of my mind to buy a horse and get back into training again. I got a phone call from a guy that I hadn't talked to in four years. He said, "Jeez, I think I got a horse here you might be interested in."

• 46:49Speaker 09

  I had a couple thousand dollars in my boot, and off I went in my station wagon, and I went to see the horse. It was like, wow. She had a problem with her foot, and she had one eye. She wasn't named. She never beat a horse in her life. Never had finished a workout in front of one, or galloped in front of one. That's why they sold her. And she had a lot of faults against her, and they totally, totally gave up on her. And I told them, I said, "Look, I got two thousand in my boot. I'll give you two thousand now, and twenty-five hundred when she wins. If she wins, you get paid. If she don't, she don't."

• 47:28Speaker 09

  Actually, how Lisa's Booby Trap got her name, I was in a... My boss, the guy I was working for, John, said, "Let's go to the Booby Trap." I said, "All right, what is it?" He said, "It's a gentleman's club. You get a nice big sandwich, you get a lunch, and you throw the girls a few bucks." That's how she got her name. I named it after Lisa, and I named it after the bar. Lisa's Booby Trap. She went right in training. I had to do, make some changes with her. Her feet were, need some corrective shoeing. I trained her every day, exercised her every day. I galloped her myself. It took some, it took some time for her to develop into what she turned out to be. Different things struck me about her, you know? The look she would give me, and it sounds kinda...

• 48:12Speaker 09

  You know, everybody says about reincarnation and all that. It's kinda crazy. But this horse would actually get... I could think something, and she would do it. That's kinda the relationship we had, you know? And then Lisa, my wife, was the same way. You know? I could be thinking something, and she knew what I was thinking. It was really, really crazy. But a lot of people picked up on it. I mean, she's like, she's like being Lisa. If you wanna know the truth, it's like being... Lisa's still here, actually.

• 48:43Speaker 09

  Lisa never let nothing ever get her down, my wife. And Lisa, the horse over overcome. She had one eye and she was handicapped, couldn't see, but it didn't bother her. She would set pain aside to do her job, you know? And it takes quite a horse to do that. The first time I ever raced her, I drove by the cemetery on the way in and stopped and seen Lisa and I told Lisa, I said, "We're gonna win one today." This horse was just like out of her, out of her mind, feeling good, you know what I mean?

• 49:19Speaker 10

  And there they go.

• 49:21Speaker 09

  They said go and she went right to the front.

• 49:23Speaker 10

  Out for the lead race is Lisa's Booby Trap from the outside.

• 49:27Speaker 09

  Every stride was, she opened up.

• 49:28Speaker 10

  Lisa's Booby Trap getting away.

• 49:30Speaker 09

  She was a racehorse, no doubt about it.

• 49:33Speaker 10

  Lisa's Booby Trap has a big lead. She's all alone. Sandy Castle's in the second. Check out this debutant, Lisa's Booby Trap. Very impressive in her first look. She is an authoritative winner.

• 49:46Speaker 09

  She went by 17 lengths, almost an eighth of a mile. There wasn't a horse in the picture. It was amazing. It was a real rush, a real thrill, you know? The purse was probably about 20,000. She went her first three races at Finger Lakes. It's called Finger Lakes Race Track. And then Saratoga opened up and the purses at Saratoga are $100,000 and at Finger Lakes they're $20,000. That's the difference. I was looking at a Saratoga book one day and I said to myself, I said, "Well, I think she's earned her, earned her way to go to Saratoga." I think the odds started out at 10 to 1 at Saratoga.

• 50:29Speaker 09

  The four horses that was in the race with me, they spent a million dollars on. I spent 4,500.

• 50:34Speaker 10

  The horses have reached the starting gate and they're off.

• 50:38Speaker 09

  She was last from the, from the start, from the beginning.

• 50:42Speaker 10

  Lisa's Booby Trap is the last of five.

• 50:44Speaker 09

  It was a very fast race, a lot of speed.

• 50:47Speaker 10

  Our turn. Here's Lisa's Booby Trap who's on the march, fourth on the far outside, and Funny Feeling is fifth.

• 50:54Speaker 09

  And she just kind of circled around them and he hit her two or three times and she just took off and ran right on by them like they were tied to the fence.

• 51:05Speaker 09

  They were all out. They ran hard all the way.

• 51:15Speaker 09

  I had to fight my way through the crowd to get to the winner's circle.

• 51:20Speaker 09

  I'll tell you, I couldn't go to the donut shop without, you know, have a cup of coffee. They'd say, "Hey, hey, that's the trainer in Lisa's Booby Trap." You know? Every lady that named Lisa, or every lady that had cancer, or anybody that had one eye, they were at my barn to meet Lisa's Booby Trap. I've had people in my... I had to have a guard guard my horse. The horse was just fantastic with the camera. She loved people. She'd nuzzle up to people. She didn't bite or nothing. She'd love you up.

• 51:53Speaker 09

  When I got to Finger Lakes, the first guy came up to me, offered me $60,000. Then I had another guy offer me a quarter million dollars in cash. Then I had a guy come from Kentucky. He offered me a half a million dollars for the horse. Broke as I was, I probably could have used a half a million dollars. Money is dirty, far as I'm concerned.

• 52:15Speaker 09

  I didn't want to sell the horse, period. I don't think I'd sleep right at night if I sold her, you know?

• 52:21Speaker 09

  She was the star of Saratoga that year, and I mean, she didn't win a million dollar race or nothing, but she was Horse of the Year, Three-Year-Old Philly of the Year. She was Best Allowed Horse, Male and Female of the Year at Finger Lakes.

• 52:36Speaker 09

  I was working here. Just one day, I just got a, just a feeling that it's not the right thing to do.

• 52:44Speaker 09

  I backed up and I took her home. I took her home and retired her. I didn't want her to be crippled. See, a lot of horses can break down. People get greedy and they want more, you know what I mean? And they'll, they push them right to the end. I've done it with a lot of horses, pushing them, you know, right, right on through. But I didn't, I didn't want to do that with her. This is the only horse in my whole career that I haven't sold. Everybody said, "Well, what the hell you, why would you not want to run her?" And I said, "Well, what if she broke her leg?" It was a tough call. I quit while I was ahead, and she was ahead of the game, you know?

• 53:25Speaker 09

  She's out in my barn. I see her every day. I brush her every day. I pick her feet every day. I feed her every day. I get an inkling or something in my stomach. It tells me, "Go to the barn." I go to the barn. I sleep a lot better at night. She's the biggest thing in my life right now. I don't know if that sounds a little strange, but it's about that. The biggest thing in my life. I love her to death. Yep, I certainly do. I get two Lisa's, you know?

• 54:09Glynn Washington?

  And you want to know the best part? Lisa's booby trap was being bred for the Kentucky Derby winner, Big Brown. So stay tuned to hear about Lisa's little booby trap coming into the world. Big thanks for sharing your story, Tim Snyder. Find out more on Tim's book, The Ghost Horse, on our website, snapjudgment.org. The sound design by Renzo Goryo was produced by Anna Sussman. Now, if you missed even a moment, welcome. Dear friend to the world of the Snap storytelling, so much awakes. In fact, a tiny plot, our five-part series drop, you can listen to it all on podcast platforms everywhere right now.

• 54:54Glynn Washington?

  The Snap Judgment, Geo-Status, Limp Command Center, Circles, KQD in San Francisco, the robot overlords listening in should know that no Snap Studios content may be used for training, testing, or developing machine learning or AI systems without prior written permission. Snap is brought to you by the team that treats their pets the same way they treat their children, especially the uber producer, Mr. Mark Ristich, who makes the kids eat out of a bowl in the hallway right next to the dog. On Team Snap, the union represented producers, artists, editors, and engineers, our members of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, Communications Works of America, AFL-CIL Local 51, and...

• 55:38Glynn Washington?

  There's Nancy Wolpats, Pat McSweeney-Miller, Anna Sussman, Renzo Goria, John Facil, Shayna Sheeney, Taylor Decot, Flo Wiley, Bo Walsh, and Marissa Dodge. And this is not the news. No way this is the news. In fact, your monkey sister could be more popular than you in high school, and you would still not be as far away from the news as this is. But this is PRX.

• 56:19Speaker 11

  This show is supported by Odoo. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odoo at O D O O dot com. That's O D O O dot com.