All Broadway is abuzz with news of the 10 Tony nominations for Urinetown: The Musical. The surprise darling of The Great White Way, Urinetown chronicles a city in which private bathrooms have been banned due to water shortages -- and the monopoly running all the public bathrooms charges such exorbitant fees that the townspeople revolt.

For PoopReporters, it's exciting to think that the glitterati of New York City are supporting bathroom equality and intelligent poop humor -- after all, that's what PoopReport is all about. One would expect us to endorse Urinetown with a hearty two-colons-up, and embrace it as positive advancement of our cause.

But at $50 a ticket, I haven't seen it yet. In fact, most PoopReporters I know can't afford to get in. Like most Broadway shows, Urinetown is for the rich -- and I suspect that Urinetown is less about promoting democratic pooping ideals than it is about the rich making fun of the way the rest of us use the bathroom.

One of the perks of being rich, I suppose, is having the means to avoid the problems that plague the rest of us. But even while they're wrapped in silk, eating caviar and foie gras, living in a Park Avenue penthouse and summering in the Hamptons, we normal folks can be secure knowing that the rich take smelly shits just like the rest of us. It's the mantra of PoopReport: rich or poor, young or old, black or white, we all piss rivers after beer and shit fire after hot wings. It's the basis of shared humanity: we all shit, we are all human.

But for the rich, the universal experience of shitting ends the second they enter the bathroom.

I currently poop on a pale blue Eljer toilet. It came with my apartment, and it's quite standard as far as toilets go. (Never mind the buttsink I have hooked up to it -- that's not because I'm rich, that's because I run this site and when companies want their products reviewed, they send them to me. With great responsibility comes great rewards.)

Most of us poop on plain porcelain toilets, sans buttsink. Most of us have cheap low flow toilets, which usually require a plunger to knock down a hefty log. Most of us wipe with cheap 1-ply toilet paper, and as a result, most of us suffer regularly from chafed anus.

This is our bathroom experience. This is what makes PoopReport.com so popular -- because everyone who reads it can relate.

Not so with the rich. Why suffer like the rest of humanity when you can throw your money at a problem and make it go away?

Before reading any further, some perspective: close your eyes, and imagine yourself in your bathroom at 7:30 on a cold January morning. Imagine being barefoot on the cold floor, and bareassed on the cold seat...

If you walk into Bill Gates' bathroom, here is what you may find:

• hydronic heated marble bathroom floors
• heated toilet seats
• automatic electronic seat lifters
• ergonomic toilet seats, contoured for your body
• auto-water sprays for hands-free cleansing
• warm air dryers for your hands
• separate bidet unit for comfort and sanitation
• warm air dryers for post-bidet de-moisturizing
• Charmin Plus with Aloe toilet paper (at least $2.00/roll)

Looking at a list like that, only one thought keeps rage from overcoming me: the rich have grown used to their comfort, and it has made them soft. I would love to see Donald Trump in a McDonalds bathroom, dealing with normal human stenches and normal human messes and wiping himself with our normal inhuman toilet paper... his baby-soft puckered bunghole would bleed him to death.

If you're willing to invest the equivalent of my yearly salary into your bathroom, you are going to live differently. Such a bathroom experience means that you no longer understand the suffering of mankind. By surrounding himself with comforts unknown to civilization past and present, the rich pooper is denying his own humanity --driving a wedge of misunderstanding and enmity that further contributes to the stratification of the classes.

And that brings us back to Urinetown. Urinetown is about the suffering of the average man and woman. When the evil bathroom monopoly takes over, they charge prices that the rich have no trouble paying -- but are so high as to drive everyone else to revolution, to insanity.

Taken at face value, this twisted modern-day Sambo play seems to support the basic tenets of PoopReport: freedom and equality of pooping. But when you look at what's really going on, you see that Urinetown is the bastardization of everything we stand for. Urinetown is nothing more than another example of a positive subculture appropriated, sanitized and presented to the rich as an opportunity to make fun of those less fortunate. And PoopReport will not endorse it.

-- Dave

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