#113 V.I.Pee

I went to this Mark Knopfler concert at Chateau Ste Michelle. If you’re a winery and want to sell a lot of wine at full retail get yourself an empty field and whore it out to a rock promoter. There were thousands of people at this thing, and every single one of them had at least one bottle of purchased-on-the-premises wine. The first place I’ve been in a long, long time in Washington where fancy bottled water and latte cups didn’t outnumber every other drink.
Of course drinking eventually leads one to the available post-drinking deposit facilities. They were clustered 60 strong in one area. No chance of a potential Woodstock here, this venue had the excremental needs of their constituency foreseen, for shizzle. Or is that for whizzle? And these were some deluxe port-a-potties too. Made by the company Honey Bucket. I’m always a little wary going into a small lightweight enclosed facility with the name “Honey Bucket” painted on the outside. First off, it’s like a calling a fat guy “Tiny” or a ax-murderer “Babe,” the sweet scent of honey is most likely not on the olfactory program. But there’s also the sneaking notion that at some point bears are going to learn how to read and being trapped in a honey bucket while it’s batted around by a frustrated and angry ursine is not my idea of a dignified demise. In any event, the number seemed to be adequate and the quality of said buckets o’ honey was tip top. Sometimes when you‘re out in the woods and the forest service has decided to dig a hole and put a box with a wooden seat over it as a backcountry latrine you find you actually appreciate the flies encrusted on the seat as a semi-sanitary barrier between what’s underneath them and your backpack-chafed derriere. Somehow a living, breathing fly seems preferable to a nameless odiferous splotch of questionable origin.
Not so here. These port-a-loos were clean to the extreme. The seats were PVC clean, the toilet paper was just like home, and little urinals were hung on the inner wall to help prevent the wine drunken rock yahoos from spraying on the queen’s throne. They even had little hand purifier dispensers, and the door lock was elbow-ergonomic to keep those hands clean.
From the outside when the door was locked an indicator showed red. When the door was unlocked, and the loo presumably un-occupied, the indicator showed green. Unfortunately wine consumption makes some people forgetful and/or clumsy. Can you say caught with your pants down? There is no perfect system when humans enter the equation.
When the concert was over of course the excretory area was swamped, and heel-hopping leg-crossing peepee patrons were clustered in the middle of the two banks of outhouses ready to pounce when a door opened in a fine game of musical potty-chairs. Or pottery lottery. Talk about trial by elimination.
Of course, the dignitaries had their own facilities. Behind the lighting tent and on top of the hill, they had outhouses with the initials V. I. P. stenciled on them. Funny, didn’t see any V. I. BM. ones.
America, ya gotta love it.