Sad: Jesse Ventura Keeps Calling The Capital To Ask If Its Too Late To Change His Official Portrait To One Done By A Chimp He Saw On YouTube
Original photo by Charles Anderson
Well this is kinda sad. Apparently, a very desperate sounding Jesse Ventura has called the Minnesota Capitol three times in the last week to ask if it’s too late to change his official governor’s portrait to one done by Lucky, a chimpanzee who can paint.
“Come on, guys, Lucky is literally the Michelangelo of chimps. Commissioning a masterpiece would be an incredible opportunity for the state of Minnesota,” said the former governor in his first call to the Capitol on Monday, “he can hold a paintbrush without throwing it or putting it in his mouth too many times and there’s even this video where he steps in the paint and stomps on the canvas and it looks like a tree. Blew my mind!”.
Ventura then recited eight different Youtube HTML links in their entirety without stopping to breathe.
“I told him we couldn’t change it but he did not give up,” said Capitol receptionist Doug Stephens, “he started getting really emotional and told me if I said yes, he’d lend me a tattoo gun and let me tattoo anything I wanted on his back and I said ‘why would I want to do that?’ and he hung up.”
Poor guy. This seems like a really big deal to him.
The former governor then called back the following day and asked again, this time explaining that he’d spoken to the artist who painted his original 2003 portrait, Stephen Capello, who said he was totally ok with it.
After being denied a second time, Ventura called again and attempted to sweeten the deal by saying he’d pay for Lucky’s first-class ticket from his home in a Liberian chimp rescue center to St. Paul as well as the artist’s daily banana stipend out of pocket. He added that if Lucky painted anything that at all looked like a penis which according to Ventura “regrettably does happen in at least one of his videos”, he would chastise him and make him paint the whole thing over again because this is very serious.
Huh. I guess we wish Ventura and Lucky well and hope the Capitol can sort this out amicably.