The Cat's Fugue
1921.
Setting: The living room of an American suburban home, past midnight. A piano stands dark in the corner. A white-haired grandmother sleeps upstairs while her grandson scours the kitchen.
Enter: New Cat.
Upon sight of the abandoned piano, the playful tabby bounds across the room and shamelessly scampers across the keys. He creates a string of mischievous dissonances.
CAT: “Look at me everybody!”
The grandson, Zez Confrey, holding a glass of milk and a thrilled expression, makes a dramatic entrance.
CONFREY: “Dude, that’s what I’ve been looking for.”
A blast of Inspiration strikes the grandmother’s living room that night in 1921. Zez Confrey sits alongside the elated cat and begins jamming. From within the wood and iron box emanates a masterpiece, thus celebrating the cat’s midnight dance: a rag with her footsteps as the theme.
And so entered Kitten on the Keys into the keyboard repertoire.
This little Kitten captured the hearts of millions. Every sort of piano was subject to his fancy footwork: the grands set upon concert stages, the out-of-tune uprights in dimmly-lit bars, the decorative instruments placed in living rooms, and even the piano sounds heard via the latest technology: the phonograph. The new joke was in: whenever a cat made her way across the keyboard, inevitably someone would say,
SOMEONE: “Aww, she’s playing Kitten on the Keys.”
