Shower with Marilyn Monroe

Last summer, I described our time here as “Summer’s Best Week,” (also blogged about here and here) and it was. Being homeless has been no big deal, since we’ve had such a place to which we could retreat. Our last sojourn here was Memorial Day weekend, and while we were here I helped my best friend Gush with a project to fix his shower. In the few years I’ve been coming here, a shower has never been an option. That fact plus the outhouse meant that, although Lauren loved it here, she could only bring herself to stay so long.

Now, however, the “Marilyn Monroe Shower” is working, and Lauren has declared that she could stay here indefinitely. Here’s the shower itself and the tub into which it flows:

You’ve probably noted that it looks a bit strange; you may also have wondered why the heck I call it the “Marilyn Monroe Shower,” since as far as you know M.M. wasn’t in the bathroom fixtures business. Here’s why:

In order for this shower to work, one must fill a bucket with hot water in the basement (and add cold water from somewhere else!), then haul it up both the steps you can’t see clearly in the following picture and the impossible spiral steps you can see, to fill the old milk jug with Marilyn’s likeness upon it. In the shower itself, you reach up to turn a valve to begin the flow of water. Well, you don’t, but we do.

I imagine if we did this a lot, we would soon become quite proficient at knowing exactly how much water we need to shower so that we wouldn’t lug a drop more than we need. In any case, we waste a good deal less water this way, since we turn off the water while soaping up. Regular indoor plumbing is a nice luxury to have, but I suspect old Marilyn Monroe here offers a more thoughtful shower.

Some kind of pulley system to move the water up wouldn’t make things too easy though….

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