Two-Year Mark

Today marks two years since I published a blog post on the Village Vanguard with the same enthusiasm and excitement I have for each of my pet projects. It has been great having a platform to share my writing and I’ve been able to observe more than toilets and jazz along the way.

I noted that most readers assumed the writer to be male when I first launched this blog. I’m beginning to think about what it means for writing to be gendered and specifically what it means given that I write in English, a language without masculine and feminine nouns like the romance languages.

In the past two years, the JAZZ TOILET team has reviewed toilets in thirty-eight jazz clubs and collected translations of “Where’s the restroom?” in over thirty-eight dialects, spoken by as many as 848 million in Mandarin, as few as 400,000 in Luxembourgish, and by an unknown number in a space alien language.

Special thanks to my friends at International House for providing many of the translations, Blue Note Entertainment Group for continually reaching out, and venues to remain unnamed for taking the time to reject us. It has been an interesting two years, meeting curious people, lonely people, creepy people, and talented people.

There are shifts in the works for the year or two ahead, though you may not notice any immediate changes on the blog. Expect a comeback of the Extra Edition covering jazz-incubating locations other than clubs and revisits to venues with new information on their toilets. I still plan on one Tuesday Toilet Talk per month, though not necessarily on the second Tuesday, as my main priorities are to engage in fewer heartburn-inducing activities and invest more time in people. Eliciting shock from friends who run into me gets old fast; I’d rather be a familiar face. I also hope to become a familiar voice to you as JAZZ TOILET continues to develop.