There's a Bathroom on the Right

I’ve written about mondegreens before. This is when a verse or lyric is misheard as something else, and it sort of takes off in the public mind.

There’s one mondegreen that eclipses all others in my mind, and it’s stuck with me ever since I was old enough to listen to classic rock on the radio. If it’s been a while since you heard any CCR (Creedence Clearwater Revival), try listening to this song without watching the lyrics that appear on screen first:

Right there as the chorus begins, you can hear John Fogerty warning you not to go out tonight, because something is bound to take your life. However, should you need it, there’s a bathroom on the right.

“There's a bad moon on the rise” (what Fogerty actually belts out) is actually a really cool line! It feels instantly ominous, like an ancient and mysterious force is at play. Immediately, you know something is very wrong tonight when you hear this line.

The only problem was that I didn’t really hear the line, at least not for the first dozen or so times I heard CCR. I heard about that bathroom.

Brad Kyle

of Front Row & Backstage reminded me about how one letter can change the entire meaning of a word or phrase, and so I wrote about that a couple weeks back:

This sparked further conversation, leading to my discovery that Brad worked on a comedy website, where he describes the shenanigans:

I came up with about a dozen or so movie titles that would suddenly change, and by missing one letter (by a sloppy typesetter), the title then lends itself to a completely different plot synopsis......f'rinstance:

I called it "Film Flam"....."The Hunk for Red October": Crusty submarine captain is nagged by constant loneliness on a voyage. Corporal McKnight avails himself for "maid service" in an attempt to give Red the massage he so desperately craves.

"Leg Ends of the Fall" (here's where a space is included where it shouldn't be, rather than a missing letter): Brad Pitt as a Civil War soldier loses his legs at the knees in early Autumn.

This one really got me. First, that’s pretty funny stuff! I like dad jokes and “groaners”, especially when they involve a little elaborate backstory. There’s genuine effort put into these little ditties.

These immediately reminded me of a time when I worked at a movie theater.

This was no ordinary theater, though: it served food and some alcoholic beverages, so you could sort of hang out and watch a movie while drinking a beer or three. One of my jobs when I wasn't cooking or pouring drinks or delivering pizza was to update the movie titles on the marquees above the theaters, and oh boy did we have some fun with this.

There was limited space on these marquee signs, so you had to be economical with your spelling choices, and you had to abbreviate some words. One sensible way to do this would be to leave off any “the” or “a” or “an” type words that might limit how much info you could convey.

Naturally, then, we really liked to add the word “the” in front of a title when it didn’t belong. 1995’s classic Leaving Las Vegas became The Leaving Veg. I think we were most proud of this one, completely destroying any semblance to the original name.

There was a teen romcom called She's All That out at the time. We made sure it said "She's All Hat" atop the marquee inside the theater. We did this for every theater, and we usually got away with it.

I should maybe add a couple of important details now. First, this movie theater was poorly managed, and that’s about the most charitable way I could put it. I’ll have to write about my experiences there explicitly some other time. Suffice it to say that there was a sense of impending doom, and a sinking ship is not always the best place to work.

Second, even though we did pranks, our intention wasn’t to be malicious. The people who came inside the theater had already purchased their tickets, and it was just a matter of figuring out which theater to turn into once inside.

With that said, that sense of mischief really carried us through some tougher shifts, and helped us to cope with near-absentee management.

If you’re interested in reading about some of the restaurant pranks I did back in the day, here’s a piece

BrianAlfred1983

and I worked on discussing our kitchen shift days:

Today was a bit of a rabbit hole of thought. I wanted to share it with folks who ask me how I come up with ideas.

This is certainly one way. This started as a simple conversation with Brad, which quickly triggered similar memories in both of us, which led to a bit of further contemplation at my end.

By allowing divergent, spontaneous connections to form, I can often discover things about my own past, or draw inferences about the world. It’s important to let your mind run with a random connection for a minute, since we have a sort of built in inhibitor that causes us to stop thinking about silly things.

In other words, it pays to leave the doorway to the absurd ajar. Mondegreens are the epitome of this style of thinking: they enter into your mind by accident, and this serendipitous contemplation can bring you to some very creative places.

What about you—have you been inspired by misheard lyrics? Have you ever played pranks like the (hopefully harmless) ones I described from my time at the movie theater? Where else do you draw spontaneous inspiration?