I take showers.

Wednesday, March 07, 2001

I take showers. My wife takes baths. It is a good thing I take showers and she takes baths because it puts us in different bathrooms. Men and women should not share the same bathroom. It’s not natural.

I am a man and when a man takes a shower, he needs a bar of soap, some shampoo, a wash rag and a towel. The towel doesn’t even have to be a fresh one. A good towel should be good for a number of showers before needing a cleaning itself. I figure that in the course of drying me the towel is cleaned. If there is no towel, a T-shirt would do.

My wife used to take showers instead of baths. When she did that, there was no room for me in the shower. Women have a lot of stuff that they bring to the bathing process. We had shelves in our shower. No shower should have shelving. Actually, our shower needed more than shelving– it needed a closet.

I looked at the shelves in our shower one morning. It was like the history of shampoo. Little bottles everywhere. Little bottles with tiny print on the back. Extremely fine print. You would think that the shampoo people had something to hide. I normally do not wear my eyeglasses when I am in the shower, so I am unable to read any of the small print on the back of these containers. I probably could not read them even if I was wearing my glasses. Why do companies do this to us? They must know the aggravation and torment it causes. Some sadistic guy who runs the labeling department must laugh himself to sleep every night. I was forced to pick one of the bottles and hope that it was shampoo and not Nair. Sort of a Russian roulette for hair.

There was everything but the kitchen sink in the shower. My wife filled the shower with loofah sponges, body washes, nail brush, facial washes, baby oil, cream cleansers, conditioners, wrinkle relaxers, skin rejuvenators, exfoliates, shower gels, razors, bars of soap in 19 different colors, liquid soap, wash rags (I’m guessing there is one for the face, one for the arms, one for the legs and one for whatever is left over), brushes on a stick, pumice stones, a rubber ducky and sponges that weren’t quite good enough to be loofahs. Just outside the shower stall were enough towels to supply a major hotel chain. One of the towels was slightly larger in size than the state of North Dakota.

And then there were the shampoos. Lines of endless bottles of various shapes, sizes and scents. &uot;I’m going to wash that man right out of my hair,&uot; is more than just a line from a song – it’s a definite possibility. I guess cleanliness is next to shampoo.

It was a regular shampoo hall of fame. Shampoos that are vitamin enriched. Shampoos that smell like a cucumber. Herbal shampoos. Use some of these shampoos and you’ll have monkeys breaking out of the zoo just to lick your head. Now I like being clean as well as the next person, but what could I possibly do with so much shampoo?

I made the mistake of mentioning the shampoo museum to my wife, The Queen B, one day. I brought to her attention that some of the shampoo had hardened to a petrified state and that it made for a very interesting display and that we should open a shampoo museum. I told her that we could charge admission, sell memberships and apply for grants. We could hire a researcher and offer tours to school and church groups. I laughed. She didn’t. She took all of her things out of the shower and left in a huff. She should have used a U-Haul trailer instead of a huff.

Actually she left in a number of huffs, making numerous trips carrying her shower stuff from my basement shower to her upstairs bath. I looked in my shower after she vacated it. I could not believe the room in there. It was like a bowling alley. My wife’s stuff had filled most of the shower. My one little bottle of shampoo, my bar of soap (actually a sliver of soap as I do not believe I have ever used a new bar) and my wash rag looked like three beans bouncing around in a boxcar. It was so spacious in my shower that I considered taking in boarders. I figured I could rent out the shower as an efficiency apartment and make enough money to pay for my wife’s bathing supplies.

I probably won’t mention my idea to The Queen B. There are a lot of things women don’t understand about men. There is only one thing that men do not understand about women – and that is everything.

Hartland resident Al Batt writes columns for the Wednesday and Sunday editions of the Tribune.