As you've all heard by now, I suffered from apparent brain freeze during the still very cold days of early spring, because during the time that my brain was numb, I auditioned to be in a play.

Unluckily for me, the same ice gust appeared to have swept past the director's cranium, because he cast me!

When my brain finally thawed by mid-May, I received a letter about the auditions, and then all the repercussions of being in a play actually dawned on me. And the one thing that jumped out at me immediately was the prospect of having to leave the house on a regular basis for rehearsals and performances.

Which also meant leaving my beloved bathroom...

Not to worry! I requested a rehearsal schedule and started planning my pre- and post-rehearsal food and beverage intake with military precision.

It worked and for the whole month and a half or so of rehearsals I never once saw the inside of the theatre bathroom.

When the performances began the weekend before last, it called for a bit of tweaking in the feeding and drinking schedule.

This was a bit more complicated, since the dramatic onset of nerves and the pesky side-effects of said nerves now had to be taken into consideration as well, while still keeping the larynx sufficiently moist in order to retain the ability to speak and PROJECT on stage.

It required a fine balance, but one that was successfully met with the help of some sparing sips of coffee.

And so the first weekend breezed by, public-theatre-restroom-free.

And this past weekend, the second in our round of performances, breezed by.

Well, almost.

Until Sunday. When my carefully orchestrated schedule fell to pieces.

Our director informed us that we had to attend a matinee performance of another play before our own performance on Sunday.

So I went. Sufficiently dehydrated and clutching the trusty coffee (see? Now my addiction finally has a purpose!) in my one hand.

And throughout the performance of the other play, I absent-mindedly (but only because I was so engrossed in the play) sipped my coffee.

And I drank ALL OF IT.

Well, I bet you, my three loyal and very clever readers have already figured out what happened next.

When we got to our theatre, I had to go to the bathroom. And I had no choice in the matter.

So it came to be that I carefully (or rather, as carefully and as slowly as my urgency permitted) entered the public theatre restroom for the very first time, my eyes pinched shut, my breath sucked in.

When I finally dared to open my eyes just a little bit, I was actually met with a small but very impressively clean bathroom.

(We all know that germs and cooties are mostly invisible though.)

I dared to breathe, and I took a courageous step towards one of the stalls.

I stepped inside and when I shut the door behind me, I realized that I couldn't turn around. My knees were against the toilet bowl and my butt was against the door. And yeah, while I'll be the first to admit that I'm not exactly petite, I don't normally get stuck in confined spaces.

But man, I'm telling you: this stall was smaller than an aeroplane bathroom!

It required tremendous skill to shimmy around. And oh, the operation to then remove the appropriate items of clothing!

And of course, then I remembered that I still hadn't papered the seat.

So I had to do the shimmy to turn back around, again. Only, this time, I didn't have the luxury of pointing my knees in opposite directions for enhanced shimmy action, since above-mentioned clothing items were now very much binding them together and rendering them pretty much useless.

Then, the shimmy back the other way again so that I could proceed with what had by now turned into an Utmost Emergency.

And when it occurred to me moments later that I wasn't going to have the luxury of sitting down, and that I had therefore not needed the paper-layer in the first place, I cursed myself, loudly and continuously.

Luckily the relief quickly... um... drowned out my frustration.

Then came the part involving more paper. And suddenly everything I had to go through up until that point seemed like a cakewalk.

Let's just put it this way: several flailing limbs later, and after contorting my not-flexible-at-ALL body into muscle-tearing shapes, and after a succession of moves vaguely resembling the limbo, I was done. And exhausted. With a few pulled something-or-other-parts in the most surprising places...

Luckily, after enduring all of that, I didn't even have strength remaining to be nervous about my pending performance.

But I've been plagued with nightmares about being trapped in a tiny bathroom stall with a gigantic gaping toilet bowl threatening to swallow me whole ever since.

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