Wine for the Love of Bathrooms

Just to keep everyone up to date, we unfortunately didn't get the condo we put an offer in on a couple of weeks ago. But never fear, we will live to search another day, and I know eventually we will find just the right place for us.

The place we made an offer on was lovely, but was by no means perfect (no place ever is). One of the issues we had with it were its bathrooms, which looked kind of like someone 10 years ago had decided to cross Santa Fe with a Grecian urn. This wouldn't have been a big deal except that the offer we made was stretching our budget to the point where we wouldn't have been able to fix the bathrooms for many many years.

I must admit i do love a fancy new bathroom; they, along with remodeled kitchens, feel like the height of luxury to me.

Even when I was younger, I was always a big fan of bathrooms. When my family would go to a restaurant, at some point during the meal I would invariably excuse myself and spend the next 20 minutes in the can.

This is not because I had odd potty training issues, it was just because I liked checking bathrooms out, seeing how they were decorated, and the nicer the bathroom, the more private the bathroom, the longer I stayed.

OK, I'm not being entirely truthful; the niceness of the bathroom did have an effect on how long I would hang out in it, but the bigger factor was how many mirrors said bathroom contained. What can I say, I was very fond of looking at myself in the mirror. I would look, I would perform, I would dance, I would do toothpaste and gum commercials. The more mirrors a room had, the more angles it provided from which I could ogle myself.

In my bathroom at home, I spent many an hour giving my Oscar acceptance speech, staring at my at-once overwhelmed and overjoyed expression as the envelope was opened and my name was called. This reaction shot was even better when I did it in slow motion to get every nuance of facial expression as I went from apprehensive, to shocked, to ecstatic, to tearful.

Invariably my bathroom-mirror-Oscar-speech was a triumph of wit and emotion, and I would tearfully thank my parents, my cast and crew and my husband (who at the time I believe was Stewart Copeland of The Police), all while looking meaningfully at the toothbrush holder and soap dispenser.

I also enjoyed enacting great dramatic scenes in the bathroom, as well as dancing. Since the bathroom I used when growing up was very small, both of these activities inevitably led to damage to both the bathroom and my own person.

Once while doing a great weepy dramatic scene, i threw myself against the shower doors in what surely would have been the Oscar-clincher for me. The shower doors unfortunately were not particularly impressed and they promptly crashed out of their ruts and fell, with an incredibly loud noise, into the shower itself.

My father came running, wondering what the hell was going on, and I immediately made something up about falling into them by accident. He was still mad at me, but a lot less mad than he would have been had I said that I was in the midst of a stunning performance and would he please not interrupt me again.

Another time I was doing a very exuberant and expressive dance routine which involved me kicking my foot against the toilet and bursting the blood blister I had on my toe. That was not as good as the time I was doing a dance-kick routine in the kitchen and broke my toe against a kitchen cabinet, however.

Then of course there were the dramatic weeping shower scenes necessary to every 80's movie drama. For me such scenes meant me trying to make myself cry in the shower until I had used up all of the hot water and had to explain to the rest of my family that it wasn't my fault they all had to take cold showers, it was just that it took me a very long time to rinse conditioner out of my hair.

Then there were the bathroom Today Show interviews, but don't get me started on those.

Needless to say, I don't spend nearly as much time in bathrooms anymore, certainly not public ones, though I will admit that every once in a while I still can't resist the occasional bathroom "I'd like to thank The Academy".

My wine for the love of bathrooms is a Domaine de Durban Muscat de Beaumes de Venise. This is a wonderful sweet dessert wine from The Rhone Valley in France, and is a type of wine known as a Vin Doux Naturel.

This means that lovely sweet, ripe, Muscat a Petits Grains grapes are fermented, but about halfway through fermentation, grape spirit is added which yields a wine that is naturally sweet and relatively high in alcohol.

This wine is sweet without being cloying, and has a light, fresh and wonderful floral quality, like honeysuckle and orange blossom combined with dried apricots and peaches. It is an absolutely delicious way to end a meal, and goes really well with fruit desserts. And Academy Awards.