Mondegreen Madness

It was close to midnight.
I sat in the back seat of my parent's car, my head leaning against the window. The bright lights of Salt Lake City whizzed past- a perpetual blur of reds and distant yellows. The stately capital building. The luxurious Grande America Hotel. The darkness closed in around me and I felt a little sleepy. Softly, from the radio I heard Elton John sing,
...Ballerina, you must have seen her dancing in the sand...
Across the seat was Koseli. She was wide awake, tapping her fingers on the door and humming the tune.
I smiled.
Koseli has an incredible disregard for lyrics. We're not sure how it happens, but she can listen to a song hundreds of times and still never know what the artist is saying. When she sings, it comes out as an indistinguishable mesh of words, in which she usually catches the tail-end of the syllable.
"hmm...hmmm----ina.....hmmmmmm..... ahhnnnnd."
This is something for which I have always ruthlessly teased Koseli. How? How could  she NOT know the lyrics to a song we've both heard so many times? I have always prided myself on my supreme ability to memorize all things, worthwhile or not. When I was young, I memorized an audio tape my family owned recounting the tales of Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves and Sinbad the Sailor. My mom would tell any stranger who sat still long enough that I was great at memorizing words, and, unlike the stranger, I was always deeply impressed with myself. 
I laughed. She scowled.
""Well, at least I'm not getting the words wrong," she said. "I knew someone who thought Elton John was saying Tony Danza!"
This delighted me incredibly, and we rejoined for the chorus, changing the words to

"Hold me closer Tony Danza... and count the headlights on the highway..."
Chuckling to myself and feeling infinitely superior to the fool who had thought Elton John was feeling romantic inclinations toward the star of Taxi, I settled back into my seat. But it wasn't long before I began to think of my own lyrical shortcomings.
With a tinge of embarrassment, I pictured myself, several years earlier, watching Mrs. Doubtfire at a friend's house. There's a scene in this movie that features Aerosmith's "Dude Looks Like a Lady." For years, I thought the song said "do it like a lady."
An honest mistake, I thought.
Then my mind quickly jumped to the misheard songs from my newly acquired Beatles craze. There was "Get Back," in which I thought the first line was "Jo Jo was a man before he was a woman" when in fact the proper lyric is "who thought he was a loner." Once again, I was lucky not to be caught singing this before I had looked the lyrics up on the internet. Unfortunately, this Beatle's song brought up another mondegreen in my mind. "When I'm Sixty-Four" begins, "When I get older, losing my hair" but for almost a full year I sang this "head." My friend corrected me, but then admitted that she had a similar problem distinguishing these two words. In the end, we decided both lyrics made sense, and so were basically interchangeable. Even from this experience, I still have no idea what is being said in "Michelle" and "Sun King" and the worst part is that I have looked up the lyrics multiple times. I just sing them as they sound, hoping that if anyone happens to be present they won't notice. "Michelle, my belle, someday monkeys four trays bean on song, trays bean on song!" I sing joyfully in the shower. Or, "Here comes the sun….. Scoobie-doobie..." Or even worse, "I get high" in the chorus of "I Want to Hold Your Hand." I would interchange this with the real lyric, "I can't hide" but for years I was honestly unsure which one was correct, considering the reputation of the '60's.
As I thought, I quickly began to realize that perhaps my memorization skills weren't so fantastic. Maybe I just memorize sounds instead of actual logical thought. I suppose I just always assume that if it's music, it doesn't have to make sense.
In middle school, if someone had walked into my lonely room while I listened to Sarah McLaughlan, they might have heard me say, "You are pulled from the pillage by your silent referee..." Or to Radiohead's "Creep," "When you're on the phone... I can look you in the eye." Most of the misheard and wrongly-memorized song lyrics in my repertoire aren't even identifiable in English. They consist, like Koseli, of muttering vowels and consonants that sound like words but really aren't. I might consider these embarrassing confessions, but everybody has some. These were the most comforting to me.

• "'Scuse me while I kiss this guy" (from a lyric in the song "Purple Haze", by Jimi Hendrix: "'Scuse me while I kiss the sky").
• "Oh Mandy, well you came and you're gay and that's faking" (from Barry Manilow's "Mandy": "Well you came and you gave without taking").
• "My Cherie Amour, pretty little wombat I adore, you're the only one my heart beats for..."(Stevie Wonder's My Cherie Amour-- an absolute classic. The real lyrics read "My Cherie Amour, pretty little one that I adore, you're the only girl my heart beats for...").

There's something beautiful about misheard song lyrics. I like to imagine that the singers and song writers have a greater sense of humor than they probably actually have. With my cheek pressed against the window, I pictured  Jimi Hendrix,  his guitar raised high above his head, ready to smash it-- and then turning to give the drummer a quick peck on the cheek. Then I distinctly saw a train of monkeys carrying bean-laden trays to a stately woman. As I felt myself drifting into sleep, my last and most wonderful vision of all featured Stevie Wonder, singing passionately to a small furry rodent wearing a red beret, stationed on the top of his black piano.