2000-04-25

Behind the Music

WARNING: the following entry is not for the squeamish. I mean it. I don't want you reading this, getting grossed out and then sending me some nasty email about it. Okay? Okay.

There are at least three dozen "practice rooms" at the Sound Museum, located in Boston's fabulous South End. While some of the bands who inhabit these rooms seem tidy enough, a great many of them are, to paraphrase Evan Dorkin, awash in their own personal stink sauce.

Again, there are at least three dozen practice rooms at the Sound Museum. The average practice room is shared by at least two different bands. The average band has four members.

There are two working toilets in the Sound Museum's unisex bathroom.

This is not a question of math so much as it is a question of sanitation.

This is one of the first things one learns about the perils of being in a rock band: nasty bathrooms. It's not so much a problem for guys as it is for us womenfolk. But if your mama taught you proper, you learned to squat, bottom hovering over the toilet seat. Not a huge crisis, really, so long as there's no reason to come into contact with any surface in the bathroom.

Last night at practice, a stricken Chris entered our practice room, stating that while she couldn't be certain, she thought she saw a mouse fetus on the bathroom floor.

"Really?" I shrieked. I crawled over my drum kit and headed towards the door, determined to verify the authenticity of said mouse fetus.

I've seen enough VH-1 specials to know about hitting the bottom in one's music career. Years from now, I want to be curled up in a big chair, lovingly backlit, describing my Fall From Grace� on Scrapple's Behind The Music special:

NARRATOR: "What happened next is painful for Lisa to describe..."

LISA: "I...I don't know what got into me, but there I was, on my hands and knees in the Sound Museum bathroom, surrounded by Rolling Rock bottle caps and soiled back issues of New England Performer, closely examining what was either a really interestingly-shaped piece of sweater lint, or...or (starts to break down)...a mouse fetus..."

NARRATOR: "Horrified, Lisa saw herself from the outside looking in, and quickly stood up..."

LISA: "It was, like, I knew I had better get up, because I mean, it was the Sound Museum bathroom, for God's sake. That's when I remembered that there was no soap or hot water. It was...it was disgusting..."

lisamcc at 11:08:27

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