Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

The Song "Tea for Two" has been around for a long time. More than 90 years in fact. It was composed for the Broadway musical No No Nanette, which premiered on Broadway in 1925 after a run in Chicago the previous year (the traditional pre-Broadway shakedown cruise). "Tea for Two" is a second act song, sung by Tom and Nanette, a couple that quarreled and broke up in Act I, but that has now reconciled. And as you surely know, since anybody who could possibly be reading this knows the lyrics to the song, Tom and Nanette are dreamily contemplating their future. "We will raise a family A boy for you a girl for me Can't you see how happy we would be?  We three..." That is how it is often sung, anyway: in the Anita O'Day recording for example. But, much as I love O'Day, this always pulls me up short. Surely the natural way to hear the second of those lines is for an "AND" to be implied. Nanette is dreaming of having two children ...

I've often misheard the lyrics to the Cole Porter tune "One of those things." It has been an odd misunderstanding, hardly worth calling a mondegren. I in fact developed an elaborate theory about how the words that I heard or THOUGHT I heard, words that didn't make a lot of sense, came to be. I thought the lyrics, as least when sung by female vocalists such as Anita O'Day, included the phrase "Goodbye dear lay-men." Why would she say "lay-men"? Because the song is addressed to non-professionals??  Why, indeed. The lyrics are addressed to a specific person of the opposite sex, so the term there shouldn't be plural in any event. I had a goofy theory, which was that Porter had written it for a man to sing, and had written "Goodbye dear ladies." When a lady is singing, she turns it (according to this bad logic) into "goodbye dear lay-men." Pretty dumb, as I say. Only recently did I check on any of this....