My wife insists I'm a freak.

Yes, Jenny has her reasons. There's the lunchmeat thing, of course, and Elvis, and there was that time in Detroit when I came home from a party at Rom's Rancho Relaxo stinking of cordite and in need of an alibi.

But besides those things, Jenny thinks I'm a freak because I wake up every morning with a song in my head. This is not to be confused with a song in my heart because that's just disturbed. Sometimes the songs in my head are good and sometimes they make me want to shoot myself, like the time Disco Inferno got stuck on repeat

Burn, Baby, Burn

but there's always something, even if it's only a jingle.

This morning it's a song from House of Blue Leaves, the play by John Guare.

For those who don't know this play, it's about an aspiring song writer named Artie who is married to Bananas but having an affair with his downstairs neighbor, Bunny Flingus. His songs are spectacularly bad, like this one:

Back together again,
Back together again,
Since we split up,
The skies we lit up,
Look all bit up,
Like Fido chewed 'em...

I love this play. If you have a chance to see it, go. Jenny and I were in a production of this back when we were both doing a lot of theater. Yes, that might surprise some of you, the shy retiring introvert that I am, on stage.

But I digress.

Back to this ear worm thing, I'm not a fan of musicals, in general. Andrew Lloyd Weber, in particular, should be strung up for the puerile pap he's foisted on the American stage. But then there's Sweeney Todd. I woke up to Pretty Women in my head one morning, and that was better than all right. More than made up for the morning I woke up to Mandy.

What I want to know is, am I a freak? I can't believe I'm the only person in the world who wakes up with songs running in his head. Anyone else? And are they good songs? Can you control them, or is your brain like mine, someone else's Ipod stuck on shuffle?

I need to know I'm not alone in this. Sing to me.