The Siamese Cat Song - Sondi Sodsai

Hello! It's Leopold Stotch from Versions Galore.

Big tip of the Mouseketeer cap to Kurtis here at Covering the Mouse for inviting me to guest blog today.

Sometime around the age of 12 I had exhausted the listenability of my entire music library; a collection of that consisted of 3 Thompson Twins cassettes, two Michael Jacksons, and an Eddy Grant. Raiding the parental's record library was out of the question as Joen Baez, The Kingston Trio and Neil Diamond all induced a malaise in me on par with brussel sprouts. Going down to local record store was not an option either. We lived in a what was called a non-commercially zoned suburb, meaning the nearest well of culture was nudie and gun filled magazine rack at the the Shell station 2 miles away.

My little sister however had amassed a small collection of LPs, all Disney, to raid. Unlike me she also had a record player. More succinctly she had an arsenal of A/V equipment; record and cassette players, 'video' cameras, transistor radios, all of it Fisher-Price (the Bang and Olufsen of the under 5 set). I still miss the smell of oversized hulking beige plasticness of it all, with all of their corners rounded for safety.

Grabbing her records and her portable(!) FP player, the listening process moved along quickly.

'Nope!' SCReeeeech! 'Nope!' SCReeeeech! 'Nope!' SCReeeeech! was the sound of the editing process as I would scrape the needle from track to track.

The quest for new music left me with a few Disney tracks that I still have a soft spot for today. There was Peter and the Wolf, Trust in Me (from The Jungle Book. Already covered here, natch.), Disco Duck (truly the weirdest Disney song off all time. Qualuudes anyone?), and my pick for today The Siamese Cat Song from Lady and the Tramp. Looking past its ambiguously stereotyped asian overtones, I've always loved this song for its trouble making mood which appealed directly to the dark prankish nature that lurked within.

Years later, during my college years, as my friends and I started growing bored with punk, we soon started plundering the thrift stores for exotica records. Long before the nascent neo-Lounge took foot when they were 25 cents a pop. Somewhere between the collected Dennys, Baxters and Sumacs I discovered little SONDI SODSAI. A one time Miss Thailand and actual bonafide Miss Congeniality, Sondi was also known as regular on the US TV series Adventures in Paradise where she would play the part of a Tahitian. Her sole 1956, Martin Denny produced release SONDI, found her cooing along to exotica classics such as Bali Hai and Japanese Farewell Song. More importantly however it also quartered, much to my glee, The Siamese Cat Song. And while her version stops short of Peggy Lee's wonderful references to drowning and dismembering goldfish ('there will be a head for you, a tail for me'), I'm sure you'll agree that Sondi's exotica rendition is just as enjoyable.