Uncle John’s Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader (11 page)

Heinz sells more than 50% of all the ketchup in the world.

UNCLE JOHN’S STALL OF FAME

Uncle John is amazed—and pleased—by the creative ways people get involved with bathrooms, toilets, toilet paper, etc. That’s why he created the “Stall of Fame.”

H
onoree:
Patricia Bernard, a game show contestant

Notable Achievement:
Making game show history…in the ladies’ room

True Story:
In 1976 Bernard was an audience member on the game show
The Price Is Right
. And she knew her chances of getting on the show were slim—out of 350 hopefuls, only 9 are chosen to play. So she thought she could safely sneak away for a bathroom break. You can probably guess what happened next: “Patricia Bernard! Come on down!” The camera panned the audience looking for her…to no avail. Her stunned husband, who’d been sitting next to her, jumped up and yelled, “Hold on, I’ll go get her!” and ran out of the studio. Amused, host Bob Barker said into his microphone, “It had to happen some time, folks. She’s in the little girls’ room. Well, if she can’t come to us, let’s all go to her.” Then Barker started walking down the aisle, followed by several contestants. Thankfully, before they reached the bathroom, the Bernards ran back into the studio to the cheers of the audience. (No word on how she did on the show.)

Honorees:
Li Zhaoxing, a Chinese diplomat, and Taro Aso, a Japanese diplomat

Notable Achievement:
Successfully practicing “toilet diplomacy”

True Story:
In Malaysia in 2006, during summit talks to improve the tense relationship between China and Japan, Aso was using the men’s room when Li happened to walk in. With the press corps waiting outside, the two talked about state matters…for 20 minutes. Then they exited (one at a time) and went to their respective seats for the “formal” set of meetings. Once there, Aso announced to his colleagues, “I just met Li in the toilet and we had a good discussion.” Asked later whether Aso knew that Li was already in the restroom, he dismissed it as pure coincidence, adding, “But it was awfully cold in the conference room.”

The term “Dixieland” is rumored to come from a New Orleans bank currency called a
dix
—French for “ten.”

Honoree:
Yellowcard, a rock group from Jacksonville, Florida

Notable Achievement:
Turning the bathroom into a trophy room

True Story:
After the band won a 2004 MTV Music Video Award for their song “Ocean Avenue,” the members had a group meeting to figure out where they would display the award, known as a Moonman. They decided to put it in the bathroom. Why? Because that’s where they write most of their songs. “The acoustics are really good in there,” explained the group’s guitarist.

Honorees:
Writer Christopher Welzenbach, producer Rodrigo Frampton, and director Roberto Lage, of São Paulo, Brazil

Notable Achievement:
Play-ing in the bathroom

True Story:
In 2006 Welzenbach teamed up with Frampton and Lage to produce his play, “Fine Comb,” inside a men’s room. The play is about businessmen who have meetings in a bathroom to decide whom to promote and fire. But because it’s staged inside a real bathroom, only 30 people can squeeze into the room at a time to see the 30-minute play. And they can’t sit down (the toilets are part of the “set”). It looks like Welzenbach and company will be stuck in the bathroom for a while as the play has had an unexpectedly long run. “We’re a huge success,” Frampton told reporters. “We have to perform extra shows every week!”

Honoree:
British actress Emma Thompson

Notable Achievement:
Writing an Academy Award–winning screenplay in the bathroom

True Story:
In addition to acting, Thompson is also a screen-writer. Her husband converted a barn on their Scottish estate into a workspace for her, but Thompson prefers to work in the bathroom. It was in the privacy of her home’s smallest room that she wrote much of the screenplay for the movie
Sense and Sensibility
, which she adapted from the Jane Austen novel. The result of her efforts: a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar in 1996. (She keeps the golden statuette right next to the Best Actress Oscar that she won for
Howard’s End
…on a shelf in the bathroom.)

IT’S A HOOTENANNY!

These songs are so well known, it seems they’ve been around forever. But they haven’t. Here are the origins of some folk classics
.

S
ong:
“Turkey in the Straw”

Story:
This upbeat fiddle tune (you might know it as “Do Your Ears Hang Low”) was a part of many blackface minstrel shows in the 1820s. George Washington Dixon, Bob Farrell, and George Nichols all frequently performed the song and all claim to have written it. They didn’t—it’s an old Irish ballad originally called “The Old Rose Tree.” An unknown musician sped up the tune and it became “Natchez Under the Hill.” Some racist lyrics (befitting a blackface minstrel show) were added, and in 1834 the song was published as “Old Zip Coon.” The same tune with new, nonsensical lyrics appeared in 1861 as “Turkey in the Straw.” The song became a standard for fiddlers at barn dances. It’s still a fiddle standard but is more commonly heard today as ice-cream truck music.

Song:
“Red River Valley”

Story:
The Sons of the Pioneers made this 1860s folk song—about a girl saying goodbye to her departing soldier lover—a country music hit in 1938. So it must be about Texas’s Red River Valley, right? Wrong. It’s about the Red River Valley of the North, in Manitoba. The song was written by an unknown British soldier who was part of a platoon sent to quell an 1869 uprising in what was then British territory and is now part of Canada. Fun fact: A hard-driving instrumental rock ’n’ roll version called “Red River Rock” by Johnny & the Hurricanes was a hit in 1959.

Song:
“Tom Dooley”

Story:
This song about the murder of a woman and the subsequent execution of her estranged lover is based on a real event. In 1866 Laura Foster of Wilkes County, North Carolina, was found dead. Police arrested her ex-boyfriend, a Confederate veteran named Tom Dula (pronounced “doo-lee”). The trial was widely sensationalized throughout the South. Former North Carolina governor Zebulon Vance was Dula’s lawyer, but he couldn’t get him off and Dula was convicted and hanged. As time passed, the trial was forgotten, but the song, written by Thomas Land, a local poet, in 1868, remained popular. It was recorded many times, but the most famous version was by the Kingston Trio in 1958. It sold six million copies and helped start the folk music revival of the 1950s and ’60s.

Temperature of milk inside the cow: 101°F.

Song:
“Oh My Darling Clementine”

Story:
It is alternately credited to songwriters Percy Montrose and Barker Bradford. Whoever wrote the song based it on an old ballad called “Down the River Liv’d a Maiden.” A man sings about his dead lover, the big-footed daughter of a gold miner, who drowns because the narrator can’t swim to save her. At the end of the song, he consoles himself by getting together with Clementine’s sister (a verse usually left out of children’s songbooks). It became popular as a campfire song and endured into the 1960s as the warbled, off-key signature song of Huckleberry Hound.

Song:
“There’s a Hole in the Bucket”

Story:
A boy (Henry) complains to his sister (Liza) that there’s a hole in his bucket so he can’t do chores. She tells him to fix it with various things and the song starts right back where it started: Henry needs water to wet a stone to sharpen a knife to cut some straw to plug the hole in the bucket…but can’t get water because there’s a hole in his bucket. The song is translated from a German folk tune called “Lieber Heinrich” (“Dear Henry”), which first appeared in print in 1700 in a book for silver miners in the German region of Saxony. The song came to America with German immigrants in the 1800s.

Song:
“She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain”

Story:
This was first a slave spiritual called “When the Chariot Comes,” about the second coming of Jesus, with lyrics like, “Oh, who will drive the chariot when she comes” and “King Jesus he’ll be the driver when she comes.” (The “she” referred to the chariot he’d be driving.) The song spread across the country: In the Midwest, railroad workers sang their own version, with the lyrics changed to “She’ll be coming ’round the mountain when she comes”—the “she” meaning the railroad that would soon ride the tracks they were constructing. A similar version was popular in Appalachian coal mining camps in the 1890s. In that one, the “she” they’re waiting for was labor union organizer Mary Harris Jones, also known as Mother Jones.

The Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, is the size of 78 football fields.

Song:
“Goodnight, Irene”

Story:
Best known from several recordings by bluesman Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter in the 1930s and ’40s, it was originally written in 1886 by Gussie L. Davis, an African-American songwriter living in Cincinnati. Leadbelly said his uncle taught it to him when he was a boy. The song is a first-person account of a man wishing he could be with his true love, whom he secretly meets late at night. She tells him to go home to his wife, but the man threatens to overdose on morphine should she ever leave him. When the folk group the Weavers recorded the song in 1950, it became the #1 song of the year.

Song:
“Kumbaya”

Story:
It’s a song from the Gullah, people descended from former African slaves who live on the Sea Islands off South Carolina and Georgia. The word
kumbaya
(or
kum ba yah)
is a derivative of the once-common English greeting “come by here,” and the song is similar to slave spirituals. It wasn’t widely known in the United States until the 1960s folk music craze. Joan Baez recorded it in 1962, and it became an unofficial theme song of the civil rights movement.

Song:
“Blue Tail Fly”

Story:
You might know this one as “Jimmy Crack Corn.” It was an African-American folk song dating to about 1845. White performers took the song and added it to minstrel shows. Sung from the point of view of a slave, it details all the things he does for his cruel master, including batting away blue tail flies (a Southern term for horseflies). “Jimmy crack corn” is a corrupted form of “gimcrack corn,” slave slang for homemade corn whiskey. “Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care / My master’s gone away” means that the master has died, so the slaves are drinking and celebrating. Fun fact: “Blue Tail Fly” was Abraham Lincoln’s favorite song.

First rock ’n’ roll gold record: “Rock Around the Clock,” by Bill Haley and the Comets, 1954.

WHAT
WON’T
THEY TAX?

They say the only certainties are death and taxes. Death may be the better option…

B
ACKGROUND

Oliver Wendell Holmes called taxes “the price we pay for civilization.” But few things provoke more outrage in people than being taxed. The first recorded tax evader was imprisoned by Roman Emperor Constantine in A.D. 306. The greatest revolt in English history occurred in 1381 when Richard II imposed a poll, or “head,” tax. The first armed rebellions against the newly formed United States were Shay’s Rebellion in 1786 (by New England farmers against property taxes) and the Whiskey Rebellion of 1791 (against a liquor tax). During the French Revolution in 1789, all tax collectors were rounded up and sent to the guillotine. And despite all that, governments persist in extracting revenue from their reluctant citizenry. Here are some of the more peculiar examples through the centuries:

• URINE TAX.
Imposed by the Roman emperor Nero, around A.D. 60. Why urine? The contents of public toilets were collected by tanners and laundry workers for the ammonia, which was used for curing leather and bleaching togas. Nero slapped a fee on the collectors (not the producers) and it was such a money-raiser that Nero’s successor, Vespasian, continued the tax. When his son, Titus, complained about the gross nature of the tax, Vespasian is reputed to have held up a gold coin and said, “
Non olet
” (“This doesn’t stink”).

• SOUL TAX.
Peter the Great, czar of Russia, imposed a tax on souls in 1718…meaning everybody had to pay it (it’s similar to a head tax or a poll tax). Peter was antireligious (he was an avid fan of Voltaire and other secular humanist philosophers), but agreeing with him didn’t excuse anyone from paying the tax—if you didn’t believe humans had a soul, you still had to pay a “religious dissenters” tax. Peter also taxed beards, beehives, horse collars, hats, boots, basements, chimneys, food, clothing, all males, as well as birth, marriage, and even burial.

The first electric ovens were used in a Swiss hotel in 1889.

• BACHELOR TAX.
A favorite strategy of governments to encourage population growth and raise money at the same time. Augustus Caesar tried it in 18 B.C. The English imposed it in 1695. The Russians under Peter the Great used it in 1702, as did the Missouri legislature in 1820. The Spartans of ancient Greece didn’t care about the money—they preferred public humiliation. Bachelors in Sparta were required to march around the public market in wintertime stark naked, while singing a song making fun of their unmarried status.

• WIG POWDER TAX.
In 1795 powdered wigs were all the rage in men’s fashion. Desperate for income to pay for military campaigns abroad, British prime minister William Pitt the Younger levied a tax on wig powder. Although the tax was short-lived due to the protests against it, it did ultimately have the effect of changing men’s fashions. By 1820 powdered wigs were out of style.