For Halloween this year, CJ decided she wanted to be a cat. “Great!” I said to her, with as much enthusiasm as I could muster, which, for Halloween, isn’t all that much. Since she’s been into singing and dancing of late, I added, “Did you know that there’s a musical show about cats?”
Her eyes widened and we went to the computer, where we spent an hour going through YouTube videos with as much syrupy Andrew Lloyd Webber as I could take. Then I went to the library and got the video.
Since then, virtually every evening ends with her choice of three songs from the musical. In the picture below she mimics some of the singers in The Old Gumbie Cat song.
Perhaps more oddly, however, is what has become her favorite song. Initially, it had been Rum Tum Tugger, which in the T.S. Eliot poem was simply a cat with contrarian tendencies, but in the musical morphed into a hyper-sexualized tom cat. Now, however, it’s swung entirely the other way, to the maudlin hit “Memory”, which, oddly, is the only song in the musical that isn’t from Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.
Hearing an almost-five-year-old singing wistfully of glory days gone by seems odd, but then a glance at our medicine cabinet and perhaps it’s not surprising at all. For folks not intimately familiar with 1970s standards, Memory contains lyrics like this:
Memory
All alone in the moonlight
I can smile at the old days
I was beautiful then
I remember the time I knew what happiness was
Let the memory live again
Yes, we’re deep into her education on middlebrow culture.
