Buc-ee’s bathroom art and the dance party that ends at 10 p.m.
Things I Saw This Week — Friday, May 23
Art
On Buc-ee’s bathrooms and the art within:
Its famously clean facilities—which it brags about on billboards (“Restrooms That Make Mom Smile”)—are unlike any other gas station bathrooms: There are long rows of stalls, often with green and red lights over each indicating which are free. The whole experience is jarringly pleasant, like how I imagine visits to public restrooms in Japan are. The art galleries can be found at the entrance of each bathroom area, where reproductions of photographs and paintings fan out from the entryway and hang along the hallways that separate the men’s and women’s sides. All the pieces are for sale, and all of them have been thoughtfully curated by Colleen Booth, the chain’s category manager for home decor.
The galleries precede Booth’s arrival at the company, but when she joined, she overhauled the selection process. It’s a high-stakes endeavor, given that the restrooms are the most heavily trafficked area in the stores, the largest of which can serve up to around 15,000 visitors a day. (Only 4,000 tourists visit Michelangelo’s David in Florence each day.) Booth selects new art for each Buc-ee’s twice a year, introducing pieces in January and just before Mother’s Day, when summer travel begins. She also tailors each gallery’s offerings to its locale, studying regional decor to determine which themes will appeal to its visitors and stop them in their tracks as they charge to the stalls.
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That customers pause to notice and purchase these pieces is a testament to Booth and Smith’s deft selection process. Some visitors even make a point of taking in the artistic offerings. Joey Laettner, a repeat buyer from Georgia, made his first Buc-ee’s acquisition a few years ago, when he and his wife were on a trip celebrating their anniversary. They headed for the restrooms at the same time, and both noticed a painting of two bears. “It was in the middle of the two bathrooms, and when we each came out, we both made similar comments about the painting. We were like, ‘Screw it, we’re buying it.’ ” Since then, the couple have bought a piece of art whenever they’ve stopped into Buc-ee’s on a special excursion together—their home holds three now.
Cities
A roundup of city-related news of note:
Chicago
“Chicago’s Secret River Concert Series Is Back”
Los Angeles
“Finally, a visual survey on L.A.’s regional style”
Nashville
“The Belcourt at 100: Looking Back”
As the Belcourt Theatre, now a nonprofit, heads into its second century, its status as a lasting center for the arts seems firmly cemented. But its ongoing existence as a movie house wasn’t always a foregone conclusion. It nearly closed its doors multiple times, perhaps most notably in 1999. In a Nashville Scene cover story under the headline “Fade to Black,” longtime staffer Jim Ridley wrote on Jan. 21, 1999: “If the Belcourt ends up demolished — a likely possibility — it will join the beautiful old Tennessee Theatre, the Inglewood, the Belle Meade, and all the other historic movie palaces that we allowed to fall or be closed. Each theater was irreplaceable, a measure of our civic history and aspirations. More importantly, it was Nashville’s alone — not a chain, not a mass-produced structure, but a singular entity that set us apart from every other city on the make. Lose the Belcourt, and we lose one more irretrievable piece of our identity.”
“Two Treasure Troves Of Rare Punk Records And Artifacts Are Moving To Nashville”
Paris
“'Paris Here I Come!': The Story of a 1950s Guide for Black Travelers”
Dance
Oklahoma City Ballet has collaborated with the band Flaming Lips on a new work.
It’s a technicolor rock fantasy: the first-ever ballet set entirely to music by The Flaming Lips, the psychedelic-rock band that Oklahoma City proudly calls its own.
In concert fashion, shifting colored light-beams will pulse to rock-and-roll beats as dancers—at times placed in the band’s trademark clear-plastic “space bubbles”—move against rotating set pieces that show a cosmic explosion of fuchsia, tangerine, and cerulean, then a trippy rainbow hovering over pink cotton-candy clouds.
Earlybirds is a “roving dance party” that begins at 6 p.m. and ends at 10 p.m.
They got to talking “quote-unquote million-dollar ideas,” said Ms. Baginski, 49, who like many peers, was feeling stalled in her career. A music fanatic since childhood, she associated “most of the big milestones of my life” with music — and dancing, she added. Yet somehow she couldn’t get excited about dancing all night to EDM.
She told Ms. Lee, also 49, she’d always harbored a dream of hosting a dance party. It would be a safe, judgment-free zone geared toward women, trans and nonbinary people that would end before most clubs even open their doors, because — as the Earlybirds website now puts it — grown women “have things to do the next morning.” (Except the site uses a cruder word than “things.”)
Film
After collaborating on the short film “Lizard,” which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and was nominated for a BAFTA, the duo decided to team up again, though Akinola insists he had to “convince” his brother to hand him the reins as director. Wale, lightly chiding his younger sibling, disagrees, saying Akinola was “the best person to convey” the emotions behind a story inspired by their shared family life.
A deeply personal journey, “My Father’s Shadow” is also a tribute to the rough charm and unexpected magic of Lagos, a city whose daily life, says Wale, often resembles a movie set.
“Everything looks like a film,” he says. “I could look on my street — there’s just always something exciting happening.”
Food
Musician Questlove is opening a “beefless burger” restaurant.
Chef Kwame Onwuachi is opening a new steakhouse on the Las Vegas Strip.
Chef Kwame Onwuachi — a James Beard Award winner, Top Chef champion, and the force behind New York’s acclaimed Tatiana — is heading to Las Vegas. His next project: a first-of-its-kind steakhouse on the Strip that draws from his Afro-Caribbean heritage while shaping the city’s next wave of chef-driven dining.
The Sahara announced that Onwuachi’s newest restaurant, Maroon, will open at the resort in late 2025. Unlike his acclaimed New York restaurant Tatiana — twice named the best in the city by The New York Times and his Dōgon restaurant in Washington, D.C., Maroon is a wholly new concept — a Caribbean steakhouse that embraces Jamaican cooking, including jerk cooking methods, with Las Vegas’s unique brand of showstopping steakhouses. Fittingly, Maroon will open in the space currently occupied by chef José Andrés’s Bazaar Meat — which is closing and reopening at the Venetian Resort this year.
Maroon takes its name from the Maroons of Jamaica — enslaved Africans who escaped bondage and created self-sufficient communities in Jamaica’s Blue Mountains.
Relationships
Tennis, a husband-and-wife band, recently released their seventh and last studio album.
“That was definitely part of our decision to make this our final record. We've just realized that success hasn't made it easier. It's actually made it harder. It just asks more of us. And looking ahead, we thought, what would that mean? This would just mean less and less boundaries between the band and our marriage. And we didn't want that anymore,” Moore says.
Emily Koch and Jim Hogan are a couple who play in-laws in the musical “Kimberly Akimbo.”
A couple for the better part of seven years, Emily Koch and Jim Hogan attribute their tension-free romantic life of late to a liberating routine: Eight times a week, the actors shriek at each other onstage.
The opportunity arrives in the second act of “Kimberly Akimbo,” during the combustible song “The Inevitable Turn.” Playing brother- and sister-in-law who happen to despise each other, Koch and Hogan funnel any underlying issues into that moment when their characters’ simmering resentments boil over.
“It’s very cathartic,” Hogan says, “and very fun.”
“Honestly, we haven’t really gotten in any fights out here,” Koch adds. “So I guess it’s working.”
Earlybirds sounds amazing!