I don’t watch The Wire, but I’ve heard an awful lot about it.  Thus, when descending the stairs to the men’s room in the Talking Head Club, I was fully prepared to find two dealers drowning some strung out kid in the toilet while a crooked cop took swigs from a bottle of Jack and cackled manically. That’s what happens in that show, right?

I was almost disappointed when I discovered the bathroom empty, but it certainly seemed like the kind of place where television violence of that sort would happen.  The bathroom itself is at the bottom of a narrow flight of stairs, next to an emergency exit that didn’t really look like it would open in an emergency.  The walls are painted an especially foreboding version of black, seemingly designed to allow the yellow graffiti to stand out more prominently.  I assume that they were dangerous gang signs, because that would be a lot more exciting than the truth, which is that some nervous kid named Phil probably found a can of yellow spray paint and decided to show everyone how badass he was.  But I digress.

My favorite part of this bathroom was that the stall door had been bodily torn from its hinges and is now missing in action.  I like to picture some drunken frat dude waking up in his dorm room, wondering where that huge plank of wood came from.  Or, in keeping with the theme, a huge bald guy in a suit wailing on a narc with a bathroom stall door.  That’s what happens in that show, right?

Cleanliness: 4/10
Amenities: 6/10
Décor: 3/10
Functionality: 8/10
Pathetically, this is the closest I’ve ever come to any kind of real TV danger: 7/10

FINAL GRADE: 28/50

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 12:08 am.