Of Mimes and Men in Communal Bathrooms

On Saturday evening, i worried that my outfit made me look like a creepy mime artist. I was wearing a short, black marc jacobs skirt with white piping around the edges. I paired it with a black tank and tall, black suede boots. Of course, I was already a few vodkas deep when this fleeting paranoia began. Kate told me I was acting stupid, so I dropped the cause and continued people watching into the colorful garden variety milling around the W's roof top bar. The bar is set to bear some semblance of a beach scene, complete with cabanas, sand, and strategically interspersed palm trees. On this night, Charles Barkley happened to have a table and an entourage of eligible, box-blondes hovering like floozy moths. From this vantage point, the W's beach was South Beach. 

In this diverse, drunken circus, a mime might have been a nice gimmick and an appropriate accent to all of the freak acts circulating the premises. Miming began as an art form to tell a story through deliberate body motions. Though I thought the roots to this 'art' were French, I wikipedia-ed it today and found that it began in Greece before Marcel Marceau and Jean-Gaspard Deburea claimed the white faced, clown-like attributes of the modern mime. When I was in Paris, I was very disappointed that the streets were not lined with these characters immune to saying hello or recommending the best Creperie. It would be a pretty great crutch to lean on in moments when you didn't feel like talking, especially when someone wants sympathy-- I'm sorry, I don't communicate in words, but, if you would like, I will act out the fact that I don't care that you are having a bad day.

As I was thinking about this, my friend Erin returned from the bathroom where she had apparently made a friend at the communal sinks ( yes, the W's bathroom has those great communal sinks. After relieving yourself, you just might get lucky by the hand dryers.). Behind me, her new acquaintance, a seemingly decent enough guy, stood and asked if I wanted a drink. In his hand, he had his own drink, one of those trendy looking Vox water bottles shaped like a hair product. I commented on how great the water bottle was and he replied that he was going to keep it as a souvenir. I gauged that this person probably had a pretty decent sense of humor and responded, "yep, you can put it up on the mantle in your living room next the framed picture of your dog."

Looking back, almost 24 hours later, I'm not really sure how this comment was so offensive or what possessed me to drop this line. I had once read somewhere, probably Glamour or Cosmo, that one of the number one turn offs is a woman who frames pictures of her pets and displays them openly. I thought this was funny and stored it with all of the rest of the useless garbage I have a penchant for keeping. 

"I DO NOT have framed pictures of my dog!" he fired back. In a two minute interval, I had lost a. a free drink and b. Erin's new acquaintance she had met at the soap dispenser. I tried to recover my verbal dart by venturing, 

"Hey, I'm just kidding...what type of dog do you have?" But this was just salting the wound. His face curled into a sour pout and then he did something that no adult has ever done to me in my entire life: he stuck his tongue out and provide an accompanying spitting noise. Before I had time to react, he pranced off, maybe to delete all the pictures of his dog off of his i-phone. 

"Melissa!" Erin exclaimed, "What did you do to that man!" I told her, laughing, and she looked at me and said, "why?" Erin wasn't angry or anything, I just think she was perturbed that I could do so much damage to a stranger with such record time. Ok, maybe it was unnecessary to accuse him of framing pictures of domestic animals, but what sane, grown man thinks its ok to stick his tongue out at a stranger? 

There's a song by an 80s band called Tuxedo Moon that has a line, "In a manner of speaking, semantics won't do..."; so, maybe, his actions made sense. Maybe it was more concise and efficient to stick out one's tongue instead of say, "stupid bitch, go fuck yourself." Maybe it was the least offensive way he could respond to my emasculating dig. At least he was direct. 

We seemed to go to the bathroom in shifts. About a half of an hour later, Kate went to the bathroom while Erin and I patronized a man for being a fashion icon-- he told us in an Ohio twang that he had a 'real' eye for fashion and knew how to make it work. There are no words to describe what he was wearing. In retrospect, I could have used polarized sunglasses. The gleam of his shiny, faux-python jacket and enormous Guido cross made me feel... woozy. Kate returned as we were admiring his watch that he got at a Trade Show in Vegas. Once our bedazzled Tim Gunn decided to mosey off and find new friends, we were able to regroup and Kate revealed what had happened to her inside the communal bathrooms. 

She had run into a guy who I used to dabble with on and off for several months (there's really no better word to classify or describe what this relationship did and did not entail), who had been oddly confrontational toward her. 

"Yeah, it was so weird," she said, "he was walking out and I was walking in and he made a point to stop, point at me, and say, 'I think I know you,' as if we only might have met before." She then recounted how he had told her she looked like she was wearing wax paper (Kate was wearing a silk-tafetta blend Christian Celle dress that happened to be one of my favorites), which he had probably confused with tin foil or cellophane. 

"I don't understand why he couldn't just say 'hi' or, better yet, just ignore me," she wondered, "so much extra effort!" Of course, given the opportunity, she threw it right back at him and commented that at least she didn't wear the same outfit every night in a row and, subsequently, ended the conversation having chalked a tally point:  Kate: 1  guy: -2. 

I thought, even giving him the benefit of a doubt that he was really drunk, that this was unnecessary and wondered what the motivation was. Was it simply to be a dick? Or, was it a means of telling me, through my friend, that he resented me? My five minute friend had stuck his tongue out at me and this former flame had indirectly attacked me by tearing into my best friend. I was beginning to wonder what had happened to having a nice, ordinary conversation. When did the need to codify semantics become so pressing that every form of communication was cryptic and as enigmatic as the Mayan calendar? At this point, even the painted mimes that were not on the streets of Paris were easier to understand than these creatures lurking in Scottsdale. Throughout the course of the night, Erin noticed that he was moving in laps around the spot where we had posted up. Whether it was intentional or not, I do not know nor do I care to find out. Under her breath, with each pass, she would tick off, "one... two....five." I didn't notice. Kate told me this later. 

Or, perhaps, everything was in my head. Maybe there was simply something going on in that communal bathroom that I knew nothing about. Maybe there's a reason to keep public restrooms separate and equal.