Monday, February 11, 2008

The Hayes Chronicles #1: Pimp My Bathroom

What’s with the obsession of the nouveau riche, crooked CEOs and other white-collar criminals with tricked-out bathrooms? There’s the Donald with his faucets of gold, and Kozlowski, former CEO of Tyco and now denizen of some federal pen, who showered behind gold-threaded shower curtains worth six grand.

Here, in Squarebanks, the fly on the wall in the recent trial of Jim Hayes, former city mayor and pastor of Lily of the Valley, Church of God in Christ (otherwise referred to by the prosecution as LOVCOGIC), learned that one of the centerpieces of the prosecution’s exhibits were fancy bathrooms for the offices of Pastor and Mother Hayes. No gold here, that’s too uptown for Squarebanks, but the word was that the bathrooms in the newly built church were furnished with “high-end” fixtures (as testimony goes) picked out by the Mrs.

It’s a crap shoot as to what constitutes high-end up here*, that was never really made clear by the prosecution, and the pics were far to murky to really tell whether that was marble on the counters or just some fancy Corian. Regardless, the bathrooms were part of a long list of no-nos that constituted inappropiate use of some of the 3 million of federal money that was granted, not for fancy faucets, but for mentoring and tutoring programs for the kids on Southside. No word from the Pastor or the Mother as to whether the kids got to use the fancy commodes, or if those were off limits.

*especially since a blue foam seat in an outhouse is considered by many, many Fairbanksans to be "high-end".

2 comments:

subarctic mama said...

I would love to see the fixtures too. Maybe there should be a Fairbanks "Cribs." Blue foam is high end. So much better than the white foam for outhouse seats.

CabinDweller said...

What is it with the ill-gotten rich and pimping the bathroom? Surely, someone has studied this and written it up - the near ubiquity of posh bathrooms and tyrants, nouveau riche, and soon to be fallen evangelists/fraudsters.

And blue foam is the way to go. Totally.