The Best Bathroom of All

October 23, 2005


Saturday it was raining, so we didn’t go to Storm King as we had originally planned. Instead Russ and I went to Chelsea to the New Museum and then gallery hopping.

I’d never been to these galleries, and we had a great time walking around in the rain, dodging into the ground level galleries along 22nd to 25th street. We had to stand in line to get into Feature Inc. who shows Tom Friedman’s work (was inspired by his airplane hitting a building with a new quilt idea), and also enjoyed a show of Jim Shaw called The Inky Depths/The Woman in the Wilderness. (sorry my camera battery went dead, and can’t find good links for Jim Shaw, but here’s a small borrowed image from the show.)

In between we stopped for NY pizza, at the mother-of-Apple-stores to look at the new video IPods, and at Kid Robot store that had lots of toys by some of my favorite artists.

Finally dinner at Peep, a Thai restaurant in Soho with a ceiling of undulating mirrors, chrome-gothish chandeliers, and fabulous food (spinach and corn peppered dumplings, H20 salad, eggplant and sweet basil in chili paste — you get the picture) .

But to top it all off, they had the best bathroom I have ever been in my entire life. Now you must understand that where ever I go in the world, I study bathrooms and even take lots of photos of bathrooms.

At Peep, you are directed by the stripey orange-gray uniformed staff towards a mirrored wall with a handle. Push the handle, go in, lock the door and it suddenly becomes very quiet. You wait for the lights to go on. But they don’t. Then you turn around and realize that YOU CAN SEE EVERYONE in the entire restaurant….BUT they CAN’T SEE YOU through the mirrored glass. Amazing.

Then you notice this peaceful buddha sculpture in an mirrored glass alcove that’s hovering between the chaos of the restaurant and the calm quiet of your little oasis of darkness. It takes a minute to get the courage to pull your pants down looking at all those people. Oh yeah, and there’s a flat screen playing foreign movies with subtitles right over the sink too.

The second time I had to use the restroom, I was all over it. Didn’t faze me a bit. How cosmopolitan of me!

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