a pedigreed puss goes pleasantly astray, 1920

John over at A Few Good Cats/What A Good Cat turned me on to this chucklesome verse over a month ago (sorry it took me so long, friend - it's been interesting around here). I'll let him do the intro:

-  In "The Music Man," during the song "Ya Got Trouble", the con man Harold Hill warns of a child "memorizing jokes from Captain Billy's Whiz Bang". Turns out there really was such a thing (although not in 1912, the year the musical is set in). Thanks to Media History Project.org, you can read some issues of the magazine from the early 1920's. That's where I found this ode to a lady cat and the tom who done her wrong . . .

Explosion of Pedigreed Cat (With Apologies to Captain Billy's "Explosion of Pedigreed Bull") 

 A Persian kitty, perfumed and fair, 

 Strayed out through the kitchen door for air, 

 When a Tom Cat, lean and lithe and strong 

 And dirty and yellow came along. 

 He sniffed at the perfumed Persian cat. 

 As she strutted about with much eclat, 

 And thinking a bit of time to pass, 

 He whispered: "Kiddo, you sure have class." 

"That's fitting and proper," was her reply 

 As she arched the whiskers over her eye, 

 "I'm ribboned, I sleep in a pillow of silk 

 And daily they bathe me in certified milk." 

 "Yet we're never contented with what we've got 

 I try to be happy, but happy I'm not. 

And I should be joyful, I should, indeed, 

For I certainly am highly pedigreed." 

 "Cheer up," said the Tom Cat, with a smile, 

 "And trust your new found friend a while. 

You need to escape from your back yard fence; 

My dear, all you need is experience." 

 New joys of life he then unfurled, 

 As he told her tales of the outside world, 

 Suggesting at last, with a luring laugh, 

 A trip for the two down the "Primrose Path." 

 The morning after the night before 

 The "Cat Came Back" at the hour of four, 

 The look in her innocent eyes had went 

 But the smile on her face was the smile of content.

 

 And in the after days when children came 

 To the Persian kitty of pedigreed fame, 

 They weren't Persian — they were black and tan, 

 And she told them their pa was a traveling man. 

- from Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, Vol. I, No. 13. October 1920 (Robbinsdale, Minn: W.H. Fawcett), p. 44.