The Epic Tale of the Bathroom Baritone vs. the Kitty Cat


I’ve been practicing my bathroom baritone nightly as I clean the locker rooms at the swimming pool (baritone because I can neither sing high nor low, because of the alliteration and also because of that excellent scene in Hogfather by Terry Pratchett). So, as I’ve been there a few months now, and as I only listened to podcasts while working there until the end of the NBA finals I’ve had a lot of practice and I’m getting good—so you know the acoustics in these rooms really are excellent. I can tell the difference whenever I walk into them.

Anyway, last night there was a cat prowling around the pool. It was meowing like crazy, and then eventually attached itself to me. This cat was—well, I don’t know much about cats. It seemed to me it was not quite full grown, not yet a cat, but no longer a kitten. A kitty cat I’m fairly certain it was a stray, as it had no collar. Because of this I neither touched it nor allowed it to contact me—I was actually fairly jumpy about that. It would have been fairly entertaining to watch. It may actually have been full grown, but I’m simply used to cats being fatter than that.

This kitty cat was my first audience as a bathroom baritone. It got a private show of me singing songs like Epiphany by Trans-Siberian Orchestra and Sledgehammer by Peter Gabriel, complete with some truly terrible and frightening dance moves performed with a squeegee. I was having fun. At least until I discovered where it had pooped on the floor I had just cleaned. Then I began to tyrannize it, my dance moves becoming truly frightening. Perhaps I’m a terrible person for scaring this poor cat, but I enjoyed the whole thing, except for cleaning up the kitty turd.

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