LISTEN: Take a meeting in the men’s room with this ’80s country tune
Country music is meant to be evocative and accessible, with a powerful story to drive the song. On all levels, Harry C.S. Wingfield‘s “The Men’s Room” fits the bill.The song tells the classic tale of a gay man who hears the call of the wild while out shopping, heads to the restroom, and catches the attention of a group of men–including, unfortunately, Johnny Five-O.He finds a way to make this experience that’s been all too real for so many men into a rollicking, lighthearted time full of both innuendo and tongue-in-cheek explicitness.Wingfield, a multi-hyphenate whose credits include playwright, health worker, and memoirist, has detailed that the song was indeed based on a true event.On his YouTube channel, he writes, “I wrote this song in the early 1980s to cheer up a friend who had been entrapped in the men’s room in the Maison Blanche department store on Canal Street in New Orleans.
I recorded it a few years later in Los Angeles with the band Portland Rose, updating the locale from New Orleans to the LA suburbs.”Thankfully, in this narrative, the protagonist gets off scot-free (litigiously and otherwise)..
