My Beautiful Laundette?
One of the down sides of being a renter in the New York City area is that chances are, you won't have a washer and dryer in your apartment. Maybe you'll have shared laundry facilities in the basement, or maybe you wash your clothes at your local laundromat. Some people use the wash and fold service, but since I can't deal with strangers touching my clean clothes, I have to do the laundry myself.
The local laundromat I got to is generally very clean (cleaner than most) with no soap gunk on the washers and minimal melted stuff in the dryers. And contrary to its suburban counterparts that take up several storefronts in non-descript strip malls, it is quite small.
The clientele is quite diverse, ranging from harried mothers with screaming children, teenagers washing their many sneakers, the elderly, the rude and the clinically insane. One woman in particular, who seems to be there frequently as of late, is one such example. She is middle-aged, about 400 lbs and with an equally large attitude. She brings her laundry in many black industrial sized garbage bags and she does her best to occupy not only all the machines, but also all of the available floor space. She talks to herself, she yells at the attendant, she insults other customers and when she sits down she takes up an entire row of bench seats.
I used to get very irritated when I had to deal with the odd cast of characters that pass through our local laundry facility. The people who played music loudly on their cell phones; those who let their kids run around out of control; those who lounged on the folding tables - not to mention the rude people, the smelly people and the ever present bootleg DVD peddlers - but really, the catalyst of all my grumpiness was always the woman described above. I always tried to ignore her and focus on my attention on the women gossiping in Spanish, kidding myself that i was practicing the language - that is, until today.
Today it dawned on me that I could just pretend to be a character in a John Waters movie. Once I realized that, all the mayhem around me actually became soothing and the chaos made some sort of sense.
The local laundromat I got to is generally very clean (cleaner than most) with no soap gunk on the washers and minimal melted stuff in the dryers. And contrary to its suburban counterparts that take up several storefronts in non-descript strip malls, it is quite small.
The clientele is quite diverse, ranging from harried mothers with screaming children, teenagers washing their many sneakers, the elderly, the rude and the clinically insane. One woman in particular, who seems to be there frequently as of late, is one such example. She is middle-aged, about 400 lbs and with an equally large attitude. She brings her laundry in many black industrial sized garbage bags and she does her best to occupy not only all the machines, but also all of the available floor space. She talks to herself, she yells at the attendant, she insults other customers and when she sits down she takes up an entire row of bench seats.
I used to get very irritated when I had to deal with the odd cast of characters that pass through our local laundry facility. The people who played music loudly on their cell phones; those who let their kids run around out of control; those who lounged on the folding tables - not to mention the rude people, the smelly people and the ever present bootleg DVD peddlers - but really, the catalyst of all my grumpiness was always the woman described above. I always tried to ignore her and focus on my attention on the women gossiping in Spanish, kidding myself that i was practicing the language - that is, until today.
Today it dawned on me that I could just pretend to be a character in a John Waters movie. Once I realized that, all the mayhem around me actually became soothing and the chaos made some sort of sense.
Labels: city life, John Waters, laundry, my life as a movie
posted by Fe at 1:37 PM
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