Why I Heart NY

Before I went out to dinner with friends tonight, I was all ready to write about the grocery stores hours here. See, back in St. Louis, if you forgot an ingredient for your Thanksgiving dinner on the big day, you were out of luck. All the major grocery stores are closed on Thanksgiving Day, which is understandable, I suppose. But more inconveniently, the grocery stores close early on the Wednesday before. The Ex had a funny story about buying food and wine at a gas station when trying to cook for his visiting family one year. But here, the Food Emporium around the corner is open from 7 a.m.-5 p.m. on Thanksgiving and is open until MIDNIGHT tomorrow.

That is awesome, but not nearly as awesome as what I stumbled upon on my walk home from dinner. For the past few weeks, there has been a hilarious Charmin billboard in Times Square that said, "Can you wait until Nov. 19?" with a couple of cartoon bears that obviously need to go to the bathroom, um, "holding it." It was an ad for new public restrooms. Well, since it is Nov. 20, the new public restrooms are open and I happened to walk by them tonight.

I was with a friend of mine who is moving away from the city a couple of weeks, so she's in the frame of mind to explore everything. There were people outside with megaphones promoting "free luxury bathrooms," and that was too good a sales pitch to refuse. We simply had to check this out.

What we found was nothing short of a toilet paper wonderland. You take an escalator up to the second floor. There are huge winter-themed Charmin banners welcoming you to the restroom. The walls are lined with framed pictures of those cartoon bears (Strong and Soft, for the two kinds of toilet paper used at the facility). When you get to the top of the escalator, a cheery women behind a desk greets you as if you are about to enter a spa. But even that does not prepare you for what you encounter once you walk down the hall and turn the corner.

There are flat-screen TVs showing a dance routine set to the jingle playing on repeat throughout the room. There was a man with a microphone making jokes ("Thanks for coming. I mean, going." "This is a crappy job.") and cueing the crowd when to chant "Char-min!" along with jingle. He was actually kind of awesome. I took video of him on my phone and if I can ever figure out how to get it off of my phone, I'll try to post it. (You can download the jingle on the website set up for the bathrooms. For real.)

Oh, but there's more. There was a dance stage set up, where I can only imagine one of the many employees taught the dance being shown on the TV screens. There were sofas. There were giant bears for photo ops. There was a voting booth to pick with toilet paper was the best. There was a GIFT SHOP. This was already to most amazing thing I'd ever seen and I hadn't even used the bathrooms yet.

There is a very organized system for using the bathroom. There are 20 stalls, although they are really more like a half bath you would find in a house. Every stall is cleaned after every use by one of several guys wielding spray bottles. Inside, you get two different kinds of toilet paper (again, Strong and Soft) to choose from. It's nuts! I might have to bring all my guests there.

ETA: And of course, I was at the Food Emporium at 11:30 Wednesday night because I had run out of baking cups for the mini cheesecakes I'm making for the church potluck.