The Bathroom Diaries #1: Cole’s Bar
(Cole’s Bar / Credit: Renée Millette)
It is a Wednesday evening and I took two buses to get here. The transfer may have gone flawlessly, or I have been stuck under the Fullerton station for 30thirty minutes waiting for a transfer. When I arrive, there may be a few people already enjoying an early evening cigarette outside (with more later evening cigarettes to come). I open the door to the bar and enter the dimly-lit space. People are already playing pool. I see some friends sitting in some of the church pews-turned-chairs. I put my bag and coat down on one of the seats and immediately announce to the group, “I have to pee.”
Here we are at Cole’s Bar. While usually a venue for live music and/or DJs to help you dance the night away, every Wednesday night—for as long as anyone in the city can remember, probably—is a comedy open mic. In an almost ritual-like way, every week stand-up comics from all over the area camp out for hours waiting for their time to do four minutes. Unlike most other open mics, this one has a pretty consistent audience throughout the night so it’s not like you’re going to be performing in a room full of nobody if you go up at 11 p.m.:00, which makes this a hot spot.
With so many people rearing to go to Cole’s every week, getting there early enough to get a good sign-up spot is crucial. Don’t worry, this is still a piece about local venue bathrooms, not about how comedy open mics work. Most of us have day jobs and we rush over to the bar to hang out for a bit to then sign up and then hang around a bit more until we go up and then go home. The amount of hours spent at Cole’s Bar, for me, means that I am going to visit the bathroom at least a few times a night. Needless to say, I know what I’m talking about.
In this project to document the bathrooms of some of my favorite Chicago venues, I do have some limits. For logistical purposes, I am only going to explore the women’s bathroom and/or all-gender ones. I think this is enough to get a good scope of what the vibe is of a particular venue’s bathroom, but you, reader, will unfortunately not get full journalistic, no-seat-unturned coverage from me. As far as things I am looking to review: decor, plumbing functionality, overall cleanliness, wall art, and any other quirk that comes along (because it feels as though sometimes a venue is allergic to building a bathroom that makes any real sense).
There are two bathrooms that I have used at Cole’s. As far as the overall look, they are effectively the same—a typical bar bathroom with white walls underneath years of writing, graffiti, and stickers. You don’t need a phone while sitting on the toilet here because there’s always something interesting going on. There are political messages, phone numbers, messages of love, of heartbreak, of a very specific inside joke. Just like you or I sit on these toilets, so did thousands and thousands of others before us—seeking relief, or just a moment of peace. The bathroom then becomes an open, ever-changing storybook. Like Wikipedia, but with more general bacteria.
Trying to get a good look of yourself in the mirror in the Cole’s bathroom is pointless. You may catch a glimpse of your eye or some nose, but most of the mirror real estate is covered in stickers. It isn’t that deep (most of these stickers are promoting something one way or another), but the mirror says, “Hey girl, you’re not gonna look better than you do now standing in this bar bathroom. Now get back out there and mingle!” A lot of us at Cole’s are there to be onstage in front of dozens, and I guess that, sure, having some cilantro in my teeth, mascara running, or a wackadoo hairstyle is not that important in the long run. If the bar bathroom mirror can’t show it, then it simply does not exist
When given the choice, I don’t like using the women’s bathroom because the smaller stall’s door has not been able to lock since at least I started becoming a regular back in October. The larger stall does have a functioning door, but the space between the toilet and the toilet paper is too wide for my liking. These are very tiny problems, and as a bar bathroom regular, I should just be happy that a toilet works at all.
Talking about a questionable use of space, let’s get into the single-use gender-neutral stall. This bathroom is absurdly, comically large for how empty most of it is (and with no hook for your bag to boot!). It’s the size of a bathroom that may have a service station in a department store, but there is nothing of the sort. The room, in bathroom measurements, is huge and empty except for the toilet that’s in the far back corner and a sink right next to it. While it is my favorite bathroom to use at Cole’s, it does not make sense. It is not good planning for how cramped and crowded the bar is on peak (and open mic) nights.
Overall, if you’re going to be spending hours at this venue, you know that the Cole’s Bar bathroom will be reliable when you need it the most. Every time you go, there’s always something new happening in there—and I really just mean in decor. The doors may not always work and things may be placed in weird ways, but they will always reliably have toilet paper.
(Cole’s Bar / Credit: Renée Millette)