Breeding

High on a hill was a lonely goatherd

Lay ee odl lay ee odl lay hee hoo

Loud was the voice of the lonely goatherd

Lay ee odl lay ee odl-oo

“Will you stop that, already?”             

Laura, my housemate, was clearly fed up.

“Hey, don’t blame me,” I said, mustering all the indignation possible. “Blame stupid, stupid, stupid Denton Community Theatre.”

“What? Why?” Laura an­swered, still giving me a slightly murderous look.

I sighed.

She doesn’t understand that all I have to do is think the words The Sound of Music, and I start singing “The Lonely Goatherd.”

I’ll sing it constantly. Under my breath, then loudly, as if I’m performing it.

“Odl lay ee (odl lay ee)/Odl lay ee ee (Odl lay ee ee)/Odl lay ee!” I sing. “Odl-lay-ee-ee!”

On it goes. My head bobs side to side, my right foot taps and sometimes — only sometimes, though — I affect the bleat of the yodeling goat in the song.

Shae Martinez, a part-timer who sits in front of me, had to endure my Monday morning tirade. I’d been on the phone with costumer Betty Ann Bar­row and swapping e-mails with board member Pat Sherman about coordinating coverage of the company’s staging of the beloved musical. No one had mentioned goats, goat herding or loneliness. But there I sat, clacking away and singing “Odl-lay-ee-ee!” under my breath.

“I can’t stop,” I told her. “I can’t stop singing ‘Lonely Goatherd.’”

“I know,” Martinez said. “That’s funny.”

Well, funny to her, maybe.

This musical must be stopped. First of all, “The Lone­ly Goatherd” is a ridiculous song. A great song, to be sure. A fun song, yes. The rest of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical is so darned sing-able and sweet it practically gives you cavities. (See, families can be blended! Friedrich can hike across the Swiss Alps without biting Gretl’s fingers! Love, happiness and “do re mi,” yada, yada.) What’s more, it’s the kind of sweet stuff you enjoy. A widower and his fresh young fraulein defeat the Nazis using music. The Sound of Music is hope springing eternal in the human breast in a two-hour musical.

But all things iconic have flaws. “Lonely Goatherd” is clearly the shadow side of the musical. Why the whole musical grinds to a halt so we can suffer the angst of a yodeling goatherd — and his encounter with the weird girl who’s, you know, into that — is a mystery only excused by the celebrated luridness of musical theater.

One of my more perverse colleagues posed a logical question about the song:

“Seriously,” asked news clerk and staff writer Greg Russell, “who’d get lonely if they were surrounded by goats?”

I think he’s aware of how it sounded.

But more important is the triggering nature of the song. “The Lonely Goatherd” induces situational Tourette syndrome. Any­thing that causes the involuntary blurting of “Odl lay ee!” has to have a diagnosis. It deserves to have a cure. I don’t know what it is yet. A former colleague once told the newsroom that, when afflicted by an “earworm,” you should simply break into “Moon River.”

“I swear,” Ava Benson testified at the time, “it totally works.”

Oh, and an earworm is a bastardization of the German word ohrwurm, which is a term for a portion of a song (“odl lay eeeeeee!”) that gets stuck in your head. If that doesn’t work, you can visit “Maim That Tune,” a Web site at www.prettypictures.com/maim. But you’re likely to get the Cure song stuck in your head. 

I succeeded in distracting my­self from the offending song for a good three days. Then, catastrophe struck anew. I interviewed Sharon Veselic, the director of the community  theater production. She actually explained that “The Lonely Goatherd” is not the cool puppet show you remember from the movie. Maria sings it to the children in her bedroom to comfort them. “My Favorite Things” is sung at the convent in the stage version.

And we were off again.

It looked like Shae Martinez would get a break, and then I got a voice mail from Mike Barrow, the managing director of the theater, about the show. Goats were serenaded. Again.

As of this reading, I could well be sitting out on the curb in front of my house, my bags lined up just like the von Trapp children. A roomie can only suffer so much of this infernal song.

With my luck, I’ll be staring into space, head bobbing side to side, foot tapping.

“Odl lay ee” indeed.