Squawk Radio

I’m working in the kitchen, cooking, cleaning up, gloating over my absolutely fabulous refrigerator not to mention the two convection ovens and the gorgeous range top, and I find myself obsessively singing. And what am I singing?

“So This is Love.”

From Disney’s “Cinderella.”

Don’t get me wrong. I adore Disney movies (I do an entire speech on the classic novel structure of “Beauty and the Beast” and can do a rip-roaring imitation of Luminere singing “Be Our Guest.”) I adore Disney music. But while I love the movie Cinderella (you’ll notice all my books tend to be Cinderella — the impoverished young woman who rises from the ashes to win a prince), the music and lyrics from Cinderella was not a high point in musical innovation. It’s bad enough that I know all the sappy words (“So this is love, woo woo woo woo, so this is love, so this is what makes life worthwhile”), but why did this song from this movie that I haven’t seen since my kids were in grade school suddenly swamp my brain (Woo woo woo woo)?

What’s more, this isn’t the first time this has happened. At the most inopportune times, the notes from the Who’s “Who are You?” (Whoooo are you? Doot doot, doot doot) will aim for my brain — and stick. Where did these notes come from? Okay, so “Who are You?” comes from watching too much CSI, but why does it play over and over for weeks to such an extent I would do anything, including watch “The Addams Family” with its inescapable theme (doo doo doo doo snap snap), to drive it out?

Here’s my theory. The universe is not made of protons and electrons, as we’ve been taught, but of song notes. The composers compile them into songs, play them, and at the speed of light they travel to the nearest brain where they embed themselves into the gray matter there to play over and over again until they’re ejected by an even more obnoxious song — i.e. Margaritaville (“Wasting away in Margareeetavillllle, looking for my lost shaker of saaalt”). Sometimes it’s possible to cleanse the brain completely of a song, but that creates a vacuum, and as we all know, nature abhors a vacuum. So if you’re somewhere near someone who successfully ejects their song, it zooms to your brain and sticks like one of those trick arrows right through the skull. It's not fatal, but it's damned annoying.

I figure I must have been wandering the grocery store, minding my own business when some mother of small children, exposed to too much Cinderella, ejected “So This is Love” from her brain and it zoomed, inane lyrics and all, to fill the nearest vacuum — my brain.

What do you think? Does this ever happen to you? Does my theory have validity? And what horrible songs are you currently ejecting … and sending winging my way?

Pardon me while I duck.