The Loo Review

I was at this porn palace in order to see a very avant garde series of one act plays being put on by Zoetrope, Francis Ford Coppolla’s literary magazine. I tell you this because I don’t want anyone thinking that this site is written by the sorts of persons who are so secure in their intellectual, professional, heterosexual identities that they go visit strip clubs and then tell everyone about it under the guise of it being an ‘experience worth deconstructing’ or any such drivel. I don’t care to participate in the intellectual, professional, heterosexual co-opting of seamy things, no I don’t.

There was no sex at all going on at the Show World I visited; it was, as I say, a series of completely sexless one act plays I came for. Well, the plays weren’t completely sexless- the 5 I saw were all about how relationships between people who love each other (or should) get screwed up, by convention and its bearing down on the interaction of two individuals, by preconceived ideas about how two men in a bar should begin to relate, by a narrator who speaks out loud the story he’s imagining is the life of two people eating brunch. They may have dealt with issues of sex and sexuality, but there was no actual nudity on stage the night of my visit to Show World. Well, there was one suggestion of nudity, and the beginning of sex, but nothing lewd occurred, anyhow. Let’s put it this way: no one got turned on by what was on stage. Bit of a shame about that, though the plays were actually quite good. And the theater itself was sort of neat, too. It was red and black with art deco-y patterns made of pieces of mirrors all over the walls and ceiling. Those I was there with (no, I don’t make a habit of going to porn shops on 8th Ave and 42nd Street alone, thank you very much) and I enjoyed the looks of the place for some time, which is really neither here nor there since this is a site about toilets, not about porn decor.

So let me get back to what I was meant to be writing about: the toilets of Show World, which I have to say, aren’t great. There wasn’t enough toilet paper (luckily I had some tissues in my bag), the hand drier didn’t work, the soap was a bit watery and not so nice smelling, and there was an unidentified liquid surrounding the base of the toilet which I’m afraid I may accidentally have splashed on my leg.

This train ride was a real treat. I was lucky- my law firm paid for me to sit in the business class section of the train, so I can’t (and won’t) comment on what the business classless lavatories might be like, but I will tell you this: the bathrooms I saw (and I saw a few, as I made it a point to visit three separate stalls during my 1.5 hour trip. You see, don’t you, why toilets interest me so?) were fantastic. They were large, had easily lockable doors, clean, colorful toilets and sinks, soap, paper which chafed not, and a choice (!) between paper towels and a hand drier. They even had little indicators on the outside of the door to let a person know whether another person was already occupying the stall the first person thought she might go and use, if no one minds. Though it’s neither here nor there (quite literally, since the train is almost constantly in motion, moving through any place that might be called a ‘place’ at such high speeds that I think it’s fair to say that the train is never ‘there,’ if you catch my drift), I do feel it worth mentioning that the whole train was a delight, from where I was sitting.

Someone’s job at this fancy place is to make sure no one ever has less than 3/4 of a glass of water, and so it is a very good thing that the bathrooms are so nice. They’ve got that kind of sexy lighting that makes a person think when looking in the mirror, “Oh, Baby, you’re so hot.” It also has plenty of soft TP and soap.

Apparently Ice T (the rapper) comes to eat here a lot (or at least my friend Sharon claims to have run into him there twice). This is apropos of nothing, except that Iced Tea (the drink) tends to make one have to pee a lot, and at Eatery, Ice T has to pee from drinking Iced Tea, or so Sharon claims. The loos are trendy like the restaurant staff– attractive, black-clad, and yet, still, accessible, somehow. The loos have in them stone sinks which, like the restaurant staff, are a little hard to figure out, but which look neat all t

[the rest of this review was lost]

This McDonalds has one of the classiest pee-spots of any Micky-Ds I’ve ever had the honor of defacing. A one-stall jobbie which was clean, tiled, had toilet paper (thin but quantiful), soap, hot water (that’s right- HOT WATER!), blow drier– this loo had it all. It even had as its caretaker a lovely older man who was more than willing to discuss with us McD’s legal troubles pertaining to the very bad corporate decision to include bits of cow in the french fries and then not only not disclose said quite-non-vegetarian flavoring, but to advertise the fries as if they were vegetarian by proclaiming on large signs and other printed matter “Fries Are Fried in 100% Vegetable Oil.” I mean, come on, at the very least there ought to have been an asterisk which tempered this statement with an: “However, Fries Are Coated In Something Quite The Opposite of 100% Vegetable Oil.” Really.