Kiss this guy

My kids’ current obsession-to-the-exclusion-of-all-else is The Pirates of Penzance, specifically the Kevin Kline/Linda Ronstadt version of 1983.

As a parent, this is about as unobjectionable as it comes. It’s not Barney, it’s not Teletubbies, it’s not Power Rangers, and heaven knows I’d had enough of dinosaurs and Thomas the Tank Engine. I had regretted indulging their interest in pirates some weeks ago by showing them Pirates of the Caribbean, whose violence is a little much for preschoolers. The Pirates of Penzance has proven to be the perfect tonic for that slight parenting misjudgment. And few things are cuter than a two-year-old and a four-year-old tromping around the house with plastic cutlasses bellowing tunefully, “I am a pirate king!”

I was a pretty big fan of this film myself around the time it came out (to the chagrin of my friend Andrew, an avid Gilbert and Sullivan aficionado [and my mentor in G+S appreciation] who was a D’Oyly Carte purist offended by Joe Papp’s popularizing alterations). So it was with eagerness that I awaited the arrival of my tape of the movie from Amazon.

Upon watching the film, I discovered that my memory of a part of the music turned out to be strangely deficient. One famous song begins,

With cat-like tread
Upon our prey we steal
In silence dread
Our cautious way we feel

But here’s how I remembered it:

With cat-like tread
Upon our prey we steal
In silence dread
No hint at all reveal

A perfectly sensible alternate lyric, but apparently manufactured out of thin air by my brain, as near as I can tell (viz., via Google search). I understand how misheard lyrics can become engraved in one’s memory, but this is a different kind of error altogether. How on earth could I have made it?

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