You may think that my glee over having three bathrooms and purchasing veritable window treatments for them is odd. You may even think it started recently. You would be incorrect.
When I was in college, I lived for a year in a student co-op (over time I worked for the co-ops, helped found a co-op, and over the next several years lived in three different co-op houses). One of my jobs was to clean the third floor bathroom. The first thing I did was paint it lavendar and mint green, my then-favorite bathroom colors. The second thing I did was bring it home to the people.
See, the third floor bathroom supported eight, a mix of males and females. The bathroom had four sinks, two toilet stalls, and two shower stalls. The shower stalls had no privacy, they opened right into the bathroom so we had a little male/female sign that you could hang outside if you were taking a shower and didn’t want to share your body with members of the opposite sex. You could also just lock the door but in co-op culture that was considered prudish and even a little weird.
In any case, I took my co-op duties very seriously and early on I sat down to consider the cleaning of the third floor bathroom. My fellow co-opers were leaving empty toilet rolls in the stalls, dropping used tissues beside rather than into the trashcan and all manner of other selfishnesses. I decided that in humanizing the bathroom, I might be able to correct some of these ills.
So, I anthropomorphized the bathroom. I began by borrowing the wall-sized pads of paper and Sharpies that we used for house meetings and started with the bathroom’s awakening.
The bathroom’s first hazy memory was of looking out to the house next door where for several weeks our neighbors were engaged in re-shingling the roof. The bathroom remembered the graceful movements of The Creators nailing boards to finish its floor and then the walls going up. The bathroom adored its walls, the wood and plaster that created its own sacred space, differentiating it from bedrooms and hallways and forever establishing its parameters.
I think you can see how this went. I wrote out the story a few pages at a time, transferred it to wall-sized sheets of paper, and transcribed it in colored Sharpies. The story continued for most of a semester.
And, the most important part, it did help keep the bathroom cleaner. Folks from other floors came up to visit our bathroom and read new installments of the story and of course we all wanted our famous bathroom to look its best. I think some folks were even a little sad when I took a different job the next semester and the bathroom’s story about life in a college co-op in the late sixties was cut off.
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