Houdini

[jeffy@syrinx.umd.edu (Jeffrey C. Burka)]

Mark Halfen writes, in response to Mike Mendelson:
>>
>>                     I'd catch the cues,
>                                    ^^^
>   It's been a while since I actually looked at the lyrics for this song, but
>   I always got the impression that the word was "queues", as in lines of
>   people.  Pardon my ignorance if this is incorrect.  
>
>>                     Watching you,
>>                     Hoping you'd do something wrong.
>>

You're right--the printed lyric is "queue".  However, I'd say that this
is a very good pun, becaues both spellings of the homophone "cue/queue"
(in English, in any event) make perfect grammatical and contextual sense.

>  This is basically consistent with the ideas I stated above.  Mrs. Houdini 
>  can't help but be affected by the possibility of a mistake or an accident.
>  She knows that PROBABLY everything will be all right, but the small element
>  of uncertainty is quite troublesome to her.

As someone's alreadty pointed out, that last verse ("bound and drowned and
paler than you've ever been") would, in fact, refer to his actual death.
Apparently one of his "tricks" was to allow strong, macho-minded folks
to punch him as hard as they could in the stomach.  Not long before his
final performance, he did this, and the puncher ruptured something (the other
poster said "appendix" and I'll buy that).  This interfered with his
underwater escape and he drowned.

Jeff

-- 
|Jeffrey C. Burka        | "Fairies are the perfect people to do this        |
|(suffering Bad Grammar) |  sort of work.  Biologically, their upper         |
|jeffy@syrinx.umd.edu    |  bodies are strong enough to wield a pickaxe...." |