Squeeze Me

The lyric of Fats Waller's "Squeeze Me" includes the line "Little Cupid is standing close by". Peggy Lee in her 1980s recording changes this to "Your baby Cupid is standing close by". I find this departure from the original lyric very puzzling. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Wallker's lyric suggests that Cupid is the wee winged god of love out there, standing by to help his baby along.

Lee's version suggests that she, as the person whose song this is, is herself the love divinity.

But what puzzles me is why Lee pictures herself - or the female speaker of the poem - as a male infant (which is what Cupid was). If she had sung “your baby Venus is standing close by” I would not be puzzled. I guess Lee is injecting some gender bending into the song to spice it up - and I am quite open to that. But I am less comfortable with the whiff of pedophilia. I wish she had sung the original lyric.

I doubt if everyone is aware that Cupid is a boy. I would be surprised, too, if Peggy Lee sought to go in for some deliberate gender-bending. Since Cupid is a symbol of love, then calling herself Cupid is perhaps just a way of saying she isn't merely in love--she IS love. The line then becomes just a hyperbolic expression of the fullness and depth of her love.

(Seeing the other, not just as someone the singer is in love with or is loved by but as being, hyperbolically, love *itself* is the subject of a song in "Showboat".)

And think of this. In "Say A Prayer For Me Tonight" in "Gigi", young Gigi has the lines:
"On to your Waterloo, whispers my heart
Pray I'll be Wellington, not Bonaparte"
I doubt if Lerner meant to suggest young Gigi thought of herself a a man. It's just an expression of the idea of winning a decisive love battle.

In the Porter classic "You're The Top", the person being addressed is referred to both as Mahatma Gandhi and Whistler's Mama, but I doubt if Porter intended it as a song to be sung to someone who is dual-gendered.

(Oh, and notice how common referring to onself or the other as "baby"--Cupid was a baby--is in popular love songs. That's enough for now. Bye, bye, baby.)

Thanks for your thoughtful comments. In “You’re the Top” the metaphors are deliberately outlandish, hilarious. But “Squeeze Me” does not seem to me to be aiming at over the top verbal playfulness - so to me Lee’s referring to herself as Cupid seems more weird than witty. Although not everyone knows that Cupid is a boy, most people who know that Cupid is the god of love would I think know that he is a boy. In “The Wizard of Oz”, the phrase “the boy with the arrow” is used with the expectation that the audience - at least the adults in it - will recognise the reference to Cupid.

I take your point about the use of the term “baby” to refer to a lover (in the 1920s I think it was particularly associated with a female lover, at least more so than it is today). But I think that that usage has become so solidified, so conventional, that it is not disconcerting even in our world today, a world that is probably more anxious about pedophilia than the world in which the usage became common. The convention of referring to a male lover as “daddy” or “papa” is not as strong as it was in the 1920s. So I think that “Squeeze Me” nowadays is more likely to be experienced as disconcerting than it was in the 1920s. (I recall seeing some shocked comments on YouTube).

I've just realised the sentence in question can be punctuated in a way that would appear to defeat the import you see it as having.

"Your baby, Cupid, is standing nearby." Punctuated like that, "Your baby" refers to the woman singing and "Cupid" to the lover she's addressing, presenting him as the god of love.

I agree that it can be punctuated in the way you propose. But I think Lee is a skilful enough singer to have conveyed the meaning associated with the punctuation you propose. And I do not for one moment think she conveys this meaning.