Grey Kitty MeowMix

I have my own WWE theme song.

Not a song I picked because I thought it would be cool to walk out to. An actual, original theme song, written for me by someone who worked at WWE.

Because, really, who wouldn’t want their own theme song?

It was September 2020. We had been working from home for about six months, and Slack was where we worked, connected with coworkers, and tried to build some kind of community when we couldn’t do it in person.

My colleague David, who I had never actually met in person, offered in a group Slack channel to make theme songs for people. Because apparently when a bunch of WWE employees are stuck working from home, someone eventually starts making entrance music.

Obviously, I volunteered.

David needed some inspiration, so I gave him a broad sketch of what I thought were the relevant facts:

I do the ratings reports.

My cat has an Instagram.

That was apparently sufficient.

The song opens with:

It moves from demos to downloads to rocking it in the ratings “like boom, boom, pow,” before getting to the important part:

This is an accurate characterization.

And then we hit the chorus:

The grey kitty is RJ, @feetybeans on Instagram, who has more followers than I do.

I should clarify something here. This is not the theme song for my made-up WWE character.

Because I have one of those, too.

When I started at WWE, new-hire orientation included an icebreaker where we had to come up with wrestling names for ourselves. It was a silly exercise, but also a way of introducing people to the culture.

I may have overachieved.

My wrestler was “The Educator” Lauren Reece, a name I had constructed according to what I considered perfectly reasonable wrestling-name logic.

“The Educator” was loosely inspired by Damien Sandow’s “Intellectual Savior” character. She was smart, but more importantly, she was absolutely insufferable about it. “The Educator” wasn’t there to help you learn. She was there to make sure you understood that she knew more than you did.

I gave her educationally themed signature moves, including The All-Nighter and Thesis Statement.

“The Educator” was deliberately not me. I like knowing things. I like teaching people things. I do not, as a rule, believe that knowing things makes me better than everyone else.

That’s what made her a heel.

“The Educator” was a work. I had built her from scratch for an icebreaker.

David didn’t have to invent much. Theme-Song Christine was basically a shoot with better rhymes.

She could rock it in the ratings, and she would crush your dreams if you crossed her cat.

Real Christine has never, to my knowledge, crushed anyone’s dreams over RJ.

Whether she would is probably better left unanswered.

Of course I kept it.

You don’t get your own personalized WWE theme song and then lose track of the file.

What I didn’t expect was for it to escape containment.

My friend M.C. Hale, “Your Second Favorite Wrestling Commentator” and “The Man of 1000 Spreadsheets,” is a Twitch streamer. He started streaming during COVID, when his work as an indie wrestling commentator had suddenly stopped because there weren’t any shows to call. Twitch gave him a way to make sure he kept up his ability to speak to the masses.

Some of his subscribers have entrance music that plays when they show up.

Mine required absolutely no thought.

I already had entrance music.

I’m not sure anyone planned that particular long-term booking.

Every once in a while, there it is again:

Because really, who wouldn’t want their own theme song?