Good morning WA2K.
Of course their fellow gibbons understand them and their favorite song:
Way down in the congo land sitting in a coconut tree,
there was a monkey and a chimp--and Lordy how she loved him.
Everynight in the pale moonlight sitting in the coconut tree,
these love words she always said to he...
"Abba dabba dabba dabba dabba dabba dabba"
said the monkey to the chimp.
"Abba dabba dabba dabba dabba dabba dabba"
said the chimpee to the monk.
All night long they chattered away.
All day long they were happy and gay,
swinging and swaying in a honky, tonky way.
"Abba dabba dabba dabba dabba dabba dabba"
said the chimp, "I love but you."
Abba dabba dabba in monkey talk means
"Chimp, I love you too."
Then the ol' baboon, one night in June,
married them and very soon,
they sailed away on an abba dabba honeymoon.
Oh, and a Happy 76th to E. L. Doctorow.
(1960) Welcome to Hard Times
(1966) Big As Life
(1968) The Songs of Billy Bathgate. [1] Short story; chronicling the career of a folk-rock musician, the tale is told in the form of liner notes. Doctorow would later recycle the protagonists' name for his PEN/Faulker award-winning novel Billy Bathgate. In an interview published in a compedium of critical analysis of his work, Doctorow claimed that he'd been questioned as to whether or not the protagonist of "Songs" was the son of the protagonist from Billy Bathgate, since the dates of birth given for the protagonists's son in Billy Bathgate correlate to the age of the protagonist from "Songs." Doctorow states that, while he had not intended it as such, he has no objection to the character being viewed as one and the same.
(1971) The Book of Daniel. Nominated for a National Book Award, it fictionalized the story of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed in 1953 for giving nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union.
(1975) Ragtime. After receiving the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and the Arts and Letters Award, it was transformed into a film in 1980 and a musical in 1998.
(1979) Drinks Before Dinner (play)
(1980) Loon Lake (novel)
(1982) American Anthem
(1984) Lives of the Poets: Six Stories and a Novella
(1985) World's Fair. Received the 1986 National Book Award.
(1989) Billy Bathgate. Nominated for the Pulitzer and won the PEN/Faulkner award. Made into a major motion picture in 1991, which Doctorow--along with most of those involved in its production-- has disowned.[citation needed]
(1994) The Waterworks
(2000) City of God
(2003) Reporting the Universe (nonfiction)
(2004) Sweet Land Stories
(2005) The March, ISBN 0-375-50671-3 Note: On Mar 3, 2006, this book was awarded the National Book Critics' Circle award for fiction.
(2006) Creationists: Selected Essays 1993-2006 (Random House, 178 pages)
(I loved Ragtime - especially the Broadway musical with Audra McDonald and Brian Stokes Mitchell
)