twofrontteethstillcrooked
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He was just ambling by pleasantly. It was intermission and I was desperately trying to push through the general crush of people to work my way to the toilets. God, in retrospect I should’ve asked him if he had any special vaguely-famous-person toilet access…
Concept: You are at the world-famous Globe Theatre, where you have taken in half a performance of some Shakespeare work in which all the characters wear black t-shirts and moto jackets, and all of them are played former Doctors Who or Tom Hiddleston. You very much need to find a toilet, despite a suspicion that the authentic Elizabethan way is to just pee wherever.
By accident, you make eye contact across the room with someone -- it’s Ian McNeice, the newsreader guy on Rome. He looks totally at ease. He’s having a happy day. Good for Ian McNeice. Drawn to him by instinct, you find yourself drifting through the crowd until you’re standing next to him and then, compelled and unable to stop yourself, you tell him you’re looking for a toilet.
“Oh,” says Ian McNeice. “There’s a special famous people toilet at the Globe, I can get you in.”
Ian McNeice takes you by the hand and navigates deftly through the crowd. You may have passed through a brick wall, or onto the street, or somehow through the floorboards -- because suddenly you are no longer in the heated press of intermission, your heart no longer racing from the chaos of families and Shakespeare enthusiasts and bachelorette parties and those people who are constantly engaged in telling others that Shakespeare wrote dick jokes for “groundlings,” and that they were people who stood on the floor close to the stage. You are in a quiet, well-lit room. You are far from the madding crowd, and indeed there is the entire cast of Far From the Madding Crowd. In fact in this room is everyone who’s ever been in a BBC, HBO, Canal+, or Masterpiece show. Just all there, wearing sweaters and loafers. Reading the Economist in hard copy or hanging out by what appears to be a Deutsche Grammaphon jukebox or arm wrestling Sir Ian McKellen.
At the far side of the room is a door with a toilet symbol on it, and it is there that Ian McNeice directs you.
You enter the room, pee for a minute while taking in a lot of inscrutable wall etchings like “Dame Judi Dench owes me TWO pieces of gum” and “looking for a recommendation for a nice pair of slippers, much obliged -Dan Stevens.” The hand towels are perfectly dry and extremely plush. You take a couple seconds in the mirror but don’t want Ian McNeice to think you’re doing something weird, so you head on out.
The door opens, and with a compliment about the famous people toilet ready on your lips you step out... into the intermission crowd at the Globe Theatre.
