Remember in “Flash Dance” when our welder/stripper/ballerina hero does the stompy toe dance? Sort of like she was trying to crush out a campfire while wearing leg warmers – like you do. Well, we’re renaming it. The former “stompy toe” dance is now and forevermore christened the “god-damn-plumber-broke-my-shower-and-now-my-skin-is-on-fire” dance.

I’m not really sure how or why it happened. My apartment was built in the early 1960s during the Great Pipe Shortage when it became common to use leftover soda straws and structurally unsound garden hose instead. The result is a plumber/handyman/guy-they-pulled-in-off-the-street showing up at my front door with a box of tools in his hand and paper booties over his shoes approximately every forty-seven minutes. Usually he has some explanation. “I’m here to fix the whosy-whats-it with the thingy-ma-bob and attach it to the do-hickey.”

I’m not usually listening, which is why I have absolutely no idea what exactly Mr. Paper Bootie Man did, but I have a few choice words for him as I am now the proud owner of the Shower o’ Flaming Death.

Oh sure, it starts out fine. You turn on the water, adjust the temperature, pull out the rubber ducky and the moisturizing shampoo. It all seems innocent enough, but in reality you’re just being lulled into a false sense of security. Little do you know the lava flow of Mount Vesuvius has been rerouted through your shower head, timed to explode onto your delicate pink skin at the exact moment you get soap in your eye.

Cue the stompy toe dance.

This is followed by no small amount of screaming and cussing. And just when you’re flattened against the wall, panting and clutching the corner of your towel desperately trying to wipe the shampoo out of your eyes, all goes calm. The water temperature returns to normal. You put your toe in, then your foot, then carefully step under the water. You rinse something. Your muscles relax. And then BAM! Stompy toe dance all over again.

This could happen fifteen, sixteen times until in a rage you attack the showerhead, hitting and banging and slashing with the ogre-sized wrench you found under the sink. You crawl out the shower door, covered in soap bubbles and caked-on conditioner, large patches of skin taking on the scaly red look of that lizard you saw at the zoo last week.

You slither across the cold linoleum floor to the telephone. You call the maintenance office. And then you lie in wait, clutching your still soapy ogre wrench.

“Here Mr. Bootie Man…Come to mama…”