The song “Smelly Cat” first appeared in the season two Friends episode “The One with the Baby on the Bus,” which aired on Nov. 2, 1995. One can only assume that, somewhere, on a Christmas tree farm in Pennsylvania (as the legend claims), a young, wide-eyed, 5-year-old Taylor Swift was watching in her footie pajamas and turned to her parents and said, “Mummy, Daddy, one day, I will bring that woman up on stage during a sold-out concert at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, and she’ll sing that song with me, and it’ll just be the best.”
And her parents presumably looked at her and said, “What in the world is the Staples Center?”
But, sure enough, the city of Los Angeles would go on to build the Staples Center four years later, and 16 years after that, Taylor — now an international music superstar — would tell a packed house that she was bringing out a singer who had “only played in coffee houses before,” and then out would stroll Lisa Kudrow in character as Phoebe Buffay to perform the song with her on dueling acoustic guitars.
Don’t ever let anyone tell you that your sitcom-based rock n’ roll dreams can’t come true.
