This month, the Center for Great Apes celebrated Bubbles’ Birthday as he turned 40.
Bubbles was reportedly born in a biomedical laboratory in 1983. While still an infant, he was taken from his mother and given to a Hollywood trainer, who then gave him to be a pet chimpanzee for Michael Jackson.
“He did get a cake — but it’s a special ape-healthy cake,” said Patti Ragan, founding director at the Center for Great Apes in Wauchula, Fla., the “retirement home” where Bubbles has lived since 2005.
“We frost it with mashed bananas and add a little bit of blue food coloring … and then we wrote his name in blueberries,” Ragan said.
The theme, fittingly, was bubbles.
“We had tubs of bubble bath. They had paper bubbles everywhere,” she added.
“He just wanted to see who was visiting,” she said. “He came and looked at all the staff that had come to be there for the party.”
The “We Are The World” fan club gifted Bubbles a photo blanket with his pictures on it.
Bubbles had another visitor a few weeks ago: Co-executor of the Estate John Branca. “This was his second time to visit Bubbles and Bubbles sat with him for a while,” she said.
DONATION: Center for Great Apes
