Rant #2,687: John, I'm Only Dancing

Today, I am going to talk about something that most people don’t talk about very much, but it is just such an important part of our lives.
 
I am going to talk about the room in our homes that is referred to as the john, the lav, the louve,  the water closet, the potty and probably a dozen other different names apart from what it is actually called.
 
I am going to talk about the bathroom.
 
We spend hours in the bathroom each year, doing a variety of things.
 
We take baths and showers in the bathroom …
 
We get dressed in the bathroom …
 
We brush our teeth in the bathroom …
 
We get all gussied up in the bathroom (ladies, makeup, you know what I mean) …
 
And, of course, we do “that” in the bathroom too.
 
The bathroom is the standard feature of every home … you just have to have one.
 
You can have a studio apartment, where all the rooms are kind of smashed into one, but you have to have a separate bathroom. You can’t have a bathroom as part of your kitchen, it just doesn’t work that way.
 
As you know, it is just during the past maybe 70 years or so that every house and apartment had its own private and unique bathroom.
 
Many houses had outhouses, where the bathroom was outside the house, and many city apartment buildings had shared bathrooms, where a whole floor of people had one bathroom to share.
 
My father often talked about growing up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and having to share a bathroom with others in his building.
 
In fact, the first time I believe he had a private bathroom was when he and his family moved to the wilds of Queens in the late 1940s, when my father was in high school.
 
So the Baby Boomer generation was really the first generation to have their own private bathrooms throughout our entire existence. I can’t imagine having to share a bathroom with others as a regular part of the day, as if we were always traveling and having to stop to use a bathroom in a gas station, but that was what many people did way back when … heck, it was certainly better than what people did in earlier generations for such needs.
 
So why am I talking so much about the bathroom?
 
Today, for the first time ever, my family and I are getting our bathroom redone … not the fixtures or anything like that, but the wallpaper is coming down and the bathroom is going to get a fresh coat of paint for the first time ever.
 
Our bathroom is 30 years old or so, and it was created when my parents decided to build up from the one family home they had to a legal two family home.
 
We had wallpaper on the wall of the bathroom, but after 30 years, it had decayed due to the heat and humidity produced in that room.
 
The same thing happened to the flooring, and we had that redone about two years ago or so, but now the walls have had it, and we have to get it down before it decays into nothing.
 
We have our local handyman coming in to do the job. He has done so many fix-it jobs around here over the years that he knows the layout of the house as much as we do.
 
Hopefully, the work can be done as quickly as possible, but right now, our bathroom is kind of “out of order” until he completes the job.
 
If the need arises, I guess we can go downstairs and use my mother’s bathroom, so we are not totally out of toiletry facilities, but our bathroom is probably going to be off limits, to a certain extent, while the handyman does his job.
 
It is funny how I remember my family’s bathrooms of yore as much as I remember my own bedrooms of the past.
 
I remember that when we lived in Rochdale Village in South Jamaica, Queens, New York, we had one bathroom in our apartment, and we had a pipe that went from the top of the wall down to the floor that was encased in an asbestos sheath. It was there to warm the bathroom, but the pipe could not be fully exposed because you could burn yourself on it if you touched it, so it was encased in asbestos.
 
Heaven knows how many times my family and I used that bathroom during the seven years we lived there, but we now know that breathing in asbestos can lead to numerous physical problems, so each time we used the bathroom, unbeknownst to us, we were putting ourselves into some harm.
 
Who knew that your bathroom could kill you?
 
Just let the handyman finish the bathroom job … we need our bathroom back almost more than we need our refrigerator full of food.
 
Pee … leeze!