The drip dry

Here's your permission to laugh about piss

I went to Coney Island this week for the first time. It was a day spent doing all the classic amusement park jollities - devouring fried food, riding roller coasters, and making dead wife videos on the beach:

@alex_kuminHe thinks about her every day

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

10/10 experience if you ask me. Like any human being with a walnut sized bladder, I made several trips to the restroom throughout the day, and found that the toilet paper was on a rapid decline in all stalls, almost as if it were mirroring the U.S. economy. By 2:00 pm, there was one stall (out of five) that had any left at all, and I was staring down the barrel of the age-old question - wait behind the four women in front of me for the luxury of TP, or drip dry?

As an avid camper, I don’t mind the occasional drip dry. There’s a wild nature to it that makes me feel more “one with the earth”. Granted, taking a squat in the woods is a little different than hovering over an amusement park toilet while the smell of “carnival people” wafts up my nose, but I’m not the high maintenance lady I may seem. I did the thing and went on my merry way.

Not 40 minutes later (see: walnut bladder) I returned, but this time I had no choice in the matter. The toilet paper was gone. Gone I tell ya! If you didn’t walk in with your own personal stash of concession stand napkins, you were airing out your chichi au naturel. As is customary for any large public area, the restrooms went unattended for the remainder of the day, and I spent the afternoon alternating between carnival rides, pineapple soaked rum drinks, and drip drying. By the time we left I was blissed out on summer fun and had successfully turned my underwear into a urine soaked catcher’s mitt.

For those uninitiated to the drip dry, here’s a step-by-step guide:

1. Go to any public restroom on the planet and make a wee. Realize after the fact that there is no toilet paper in the roll.

2. Frustratingly look in your bag for tissues (there won’t be any). Decide whether or not an empty pack of Orbit gum will suffice (it won’t).

3. Take a moment to decide if it’s worth going back outside to grab tissues, but get interrupted by a frustrated knock on the door. PEOPLE ARE WAITING.

4. Stand up. The back of your thighs will be covered in someone else’s urine, deposited on the seat long before you walked in. Accept your reality and remind yourself to sit in a bath of Clorox when you get home.

5. Commence the drip dry - a cross between sumo squats and twerking. The goal is to dry the area as much as possible through up and down movement/air flow. Maybe one drop will fall out, but most of it will just gently slide down your leg like the sap from the Jurassic Park “Dino DNA” scene.

   

6. Sigh loudly.

7. Pull up your pants and walk outside, triumphantly sporting a crotch more humid than Southeast Asia.

   ---

Now for part two of my tale. I went to work at the Comedy Cellar that night in hopes of making a joke about all this on stage, but when I started getting into the mechanics of drip drying, I was met with silent laughs from women covering their faces and blank/horrified stares from the men. I politely asked the women to uncover their mouths and laugh out loud (the audacity!) then paused my set to ask the men in the crowd if they knew what I was talking about. Not one of them did. At a sold out show of 300 people. I asked the men in the subsequent shows I did that night, as well as the next, and was met with the same confusion. Here’s what I can confirm:

Men don’t know about women’s bodies, and women are still afraid to acknowledge they have vaginas

As a former sex educator, I’m fully aware that on a societal level we hate talking about bodies, especially women’s bodies and especially anything having to do with the word vagina. I want to make this next point very clear: our subpar sex education system is a failure to everyone - every gender identity and every sexual orientation, at every stage of development. We don’t educate anyone correctly on what equipment they’ve got, how to take care of it themselves, how to handle it (safely) on the road with others, and definitely not have to drive well. I’m not here to admonish anyone on what they don’t know or have been taught is “inappropriate to discuss”, but in the age of information, there’s no reason for anyone to be in the dark about their bodies anymore.

When I’m on stage, I joke a lot about (reproductive) health, the pill, sex, and other subjects under the “we don’t talk about that” umbrella. It’s still wild to watch grown men turning red and uncomfortable at the mention of these words, and the women sitting next to them too afraid to laugh at a joke that might “out” them as someone with normal bodily functions. I’ve noticed that this is particularly common during shows where the audience is largely male. When the audience is made up of more women, it almost gives them permission to laugh with each other about these topics.

It never ceases to amaze me that even with all the advancements we’ve made in talking about our bodies and ourselves (shoutout Boston Women’s Health Collective), there is still such a ways to go in normalizing the vessels that we all have, that come in various shapes and sizes but all perform the same relative functions.

So to anyone reading this who has ever drip dried, I implore you to send it to a fellow dripper AND with someone who might not be aware of the phenomenon. Half of the population is walking around town with a wet crotch and impending pH balance, and I want some real laughs the next time I talk about it on stage, which will be every night, for the rest of eternity.

Stay dry, folks.