mahna mahna

Remember that old Muppet song, "Mahna Mahna"? The one with the scatting and the female backup singers?
I may be going to Hades for my mahna actions yesterday. I was biking to work through Manhattan in the morning, and i came to a long stop at an intersection. On the corner, there was an Asian woman handing out literature. She may have been one of the Falun Gong advocates. If you don't know about Falun Gong, they are a spiritual group in China that seems to be undergoing horrific government persecution which is shy of genocide, but not by much. So, you know, not exactly a situation one ought make light of.
And i didn't, i swear.
I think.
Y'see, she kept on calling out a phrase every four or five seconds, as she held up her pamphlets. I've asked a Mandarin-speaking friend what she might have been saying, and came up empty. But if she wasn't saying "mahna mahna"...well then, she sure, um, sounded EXACTLY like a non-English speaker who had been played a tape of the Muppet song, then was asked to stand on a corner and shout the chorus, over and over. I swear. It took me three or four "mahna mahnas" to realize all this. After her next one, i quietly sang the backup singers' "doo dooo de doo-doot". And then i sang again after her next "mahna mahna". She went on like clockwork, and i kept quietly singing. This went on for another five or six repeats.
I was racked with suppressed (and not-so-suppressed) laughter for the next thirty-seven minutes.
Wildflowers amuse easily.