Like Niagara Falls. Or the prom scene from Carrie.

Boys, hide your eyes. I'm going to talk about men-stroo-ation. Again. Sorry.

Ladies, you know that there are periods and then there are those periods that make you step back and say "Great jumping jehosephat, what on earth happened to me?"

It's like when you are standing there at the Niagara Falls, feeling like there is NO WAY all that water could come from Canada. It just doesn't seem possible. But there it is.

Last night I was having a Niagara Falls incident.

And I was out watching quite possibly the world's most tweeted Karaoke Night with about a dozen bloggers at the unfortunately named "Dimples" in beautiful downtown Burbank, California.

I went to the one solo restroom to pee.

As soon as I sat down, someone rattled the door, trying to get in, and yelled SORRY!!

When I went to flush, the handle did that thing where it just goes all the way to the bottom without the normal feeling of flushing and then about 3 ounces of water dispenses into the bowl and the toilet contents swirl and swirl and never go down.

I waited and waited. I could hear the girl outside talking to someone. And then someone else.

I flushed ---- too soon --- swirl, swirl, swirl.

Waiting. Voices from outside "Come ONNNNN!" "My GAWD!!"

I considered just waltzing out and leaving the toilet unflushed. But the Niagara Falls effect had done its worst and I wasn't eager to share that with the world.

As a matter of fact, this photo of OJ:

was on the ceiling above the toilet, and it looked a bit like he had been there. On a certain night in June 1994. Allegedly.

So I waited and waited for the toilet to fill. Again. Again.

I was probably in there more than 5 minutes, which seems like forever when you are on the inside of a toilet stall door and you know there are a line of people on the outside of the toilet stall and YOU KNOW WHAT THEY ARE THINKING. And what they are thinking isn't "Oh, she is probably politely waiting for the defective toilet to finish flushing."

I had victory on the fourth flush. Evidence destroyed.

I walked out to a line of people glaring at me with Horror and Disgust. I was, in their eyes, the woman who had dared poop in the one tiny stall of a busy club.

I thought about trying to explain myself. "Niagara Falls! Canadians! Toilets that don't work right!" but then I decided to cut my losses and skeedaddle back to the truly embarrassing part of the evening - karaoke.


Badass Dad sings (and sings well) while Undomestic Diva videos/photos/tweets or something.

A long way from pirate pants

One of the great disappointments of my life has been, of course, Mel. You know who I'm talking about. THE Mel. But I want to know - how could a man who started out so good go so bad?

When I was in college, my girlfriends and I swooned over every one of Mel's movie appearances. We escaped from homework and went to distract ourselves with thoughts of Mel...ahhhh Mel.

He was the hottest thing since Tabasco sauce! Even with the movie theater air conditioning blasting, we had to dab our youthful, unlined brows with those little foldy paper napkins from the snack bar.

And how could we not? He started out as a leather-glad road warrior with a cute Aussie accent in Mad Max:


Then he steamed up the Indonesian tropics as idealistic cub reporter Guy Hamilton in "The Year of Living Dangerously," which left us all wanting to be Sigourney Weaver:


And who could ever forget that unbuttoned shirt and the ponytail and those pirate pants Mel wore as he played ultimate Sailor Bad Boy Fletcher Christian in The Bounty? Not me!

(Edited to add: a whole Internet and not a single photo of the pirate pants? What kind of cruel world IS this??)

We heard that Mel was happily married and quite religious and didn't believe in birth control. That put me off a bit, and soon other fantasy men replaced Mel in my affections, like all of the Team 7-11 Tour de France riders:

Why am I craving a Slurpee?...but I digress.

After college, Mel started doing sillier and sillier movies and I sort of lost track of him until he built a chapel for hardcore old-school Catholics in my area and he popped back onto my radar.

That didn't bother me. You can practice whatever religion you want, but when you proclaim your religion and then show up allegedly driving drunk and making anti-Semitic slurs and calling a female police officer "Sugar Tits," well, I'm outie.

I have this theory about drunkenness. People generally become more of what they really, truly are when they get intoxicated. The person with sublimated rage starts throwing punches. The comic starts getting sillier. And the anti-Semite anti-feminist? He starts acting like Mel did.

Mugshot

Oh, and Mel? If you're gonna try to keep working in Hollywood, you might wanta get right with Judaism. Just sayin' that Msrs. Katzenburg, Spielberg and Glazer might not wanna hear your theory about how Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.

But losing faith in Mel back then was convenient, because now I don't have to get irritated because of this whole Russian pregnant girlfriend/divorce mess and I don't have to point out that, hey, don't old-school Catholics generally disapprove of divorce? Because that would be unkind of me to say, wouldn't it?

Almost as unkind as posting a photo like this:

Don't worry, man. I'm sure she loves you for your personality.