Perhaps it's part of those potential OCD tendencies that hang on the fringe of my personality, but I am one of those people who gets a song in my head and can't exorcise it at will. Certain songs can take up residence in my brain for minutes, hours, days and in one unfortunate instance, weeks. It's not limited to genre, but the effects have alienated friends, family and multiple people on the streets and subways of New York City.

The manifestation sets in as the song inexplicably starts to play over and over in my brain. The next stage migrates to humming the tune. Out loud. Often. And the next stage (and this is only in the most advanced cases of my song repetition illness) is singing snippets of it out loud. It is as close to Tourette's Syndrome as I ever hope to come. I can not sing well, but that doesn't seem to deter me. People on the street have crossed into ongoing traffic when they hear me suddenly shriek a few random bars of "I Touch Myself." I simply can't help it--it is utterly involuntary.

This defect can first be attributed to my youthful tendency to play 45 records over and over and over. My earliest recollection involves playing Sly & The Family Stone's "Everyday People" no less than 85 times before my frazzled mother appeared in the doorway of my bedroom and screamed, "Stop that bloody din!"

I have noticed a pronouncement of this illness since meeting my friend Jewels. Jewels was reared in a petrie dish of musical theater. While his SAG card has long since expired, the showman has not. Jewels is also a co-worker and can be counted on to interrupt the tedium of the workday by bursting into my office at a doubletime high step, arms askew and a song bursting forth from his fabulous lips. And thank God. It doesn't take much for me to join in. We sang an entire duet medley of Rogers & Hammerstein's "Cinderella" yesterday while waiting for a conference call to start. I love him to pieces.

So where does Jewels fall into this diatribe about repetitive song syndrome? Jewels' repertoire of song is not limited to show tunes. Often when he bursts into song, whether in the office or when we're traipsing the streets in search of some decent coffee, it may be a rock or pop or funk tune. Perhaps it is fortunate that rap not yet entered his lexicon. But here is the problem. The mere suggestion of a particular song may set off the very neuron that perpetuates my own repetitive song syndrome. I have to blame Jewels for my own post traumatic repetitive disorder in a few key cases. "Bitch" was a hard song to shake. "Let's Talk About Sex", another. "Midnight Train to Georgia" (in which I took the role of the lead Pip to his Gladys Knight, with choreographed hand gestures), a killer. But the most debilitating case was Olivia Newton John's 1980s song "Heart Attack." That unlikely song choice played staccato havoc with me for no less than three weeks. I could have killed Jewels for blurting out the chorus to that crap song in the first place and I feared a lobotomy would be the only solution to banish that unfortunate song from my head forever. One day I woke up, and thank Christ, the fever had passed.

Since that time, the songs come and go. I am currently on Day Three of an old Percy Sledge gem, "Try a Little Tenderness." When I got on the subway to come home from work tonight, I found myself mentally deep in the song bridge and the buildup where Percy, almost in knots, sings "You Got Ta, Got Ta, Got Ta.." and to my horror, I heard my own voice singing the very words, my head accenting each syllable for emphasis....and other commuters moving, ever so gently, away from me on the train.