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She finds inspiration during her bathroom breaks. Honeycomb Working Panel Supplier
Bed-Stuy resident Caitlin Cook wrote an entire musical based on quotes she found scrawled on bathroom stalls.
After college, the art history major grew tired of how pretentious that world could be, and became fascinated with bathroom graffiti.
“I loved the idea that if you take all that elitism away, you just have people trying to communicate with each other,” Cook, 33, told The Post.
She first found inspiration in a dive bar in Chicago: “Writing on toilet walls is neither for critical acclaim nor financial reward. It is the purest form of art.”
Thus began her 10-year search for quotes scribbled in restrooms in places like Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam, Indonesia and Iceland.
In women’s bathrooms, she often finds “gossipy, fun” dialogue and empowering notes.
“Where someone writes something poetic about her relationship, someone will respond and say, ‘Girl, it’s time to leave him,'” she said.
Men’s stalls tend to have more lewd drawings than motivational messages. “There’s definitely a lot of illustrated penises,” she said.
Creative ones she’s seen have been intricately drawn wearing a business suit, as an angel, ninja, cowboy and smoking a cigarette.
Cook even admitted to scrawling some of her own.
‘I won’t lie, I’ve written some myself,” she said.
“If I wanna draw a d–k, I’m gonna do it.”
After she began sharing her findings on TikTok and Instagram, her posts started going viral.
A recent video of hers — that already has 1 million views — included the conversation she captured in a stall in England that started with “Yo, girl, on a scale of 1 to America, how free are you tonight?”
“And someone wrote, ‘Germany 1942,'” she said.
Bathroom graffiti also differs by continent.
“It’s funny, I think there’s less in Europe because they clean up their bathrooms a bit more; they’ll paint over it more frequently,” Cook observed.
“But there tends to be more political stuff there.”
People now send her bathroom graffiti they’ve stumbled upon — and she can receive 50 photos a day from people in as far away as South Africa.
“Oh, this one’s great, ‘Lots of girls carry knives while they be pooping,’ and it’s just carved with a knife into the bathroom,” she said of one sent to her via Instagram.
“When I’m alone I like to fill the bathtub with tomato sauce and pretend I’m a meatball. Don’t judge me!” one bathroom graffiti artist wrote.
After five years of photographing the scrawls, she decided to pen a song with her favorites — which she called “The Purest Form of Art.”
It garnered such positive feedback that she decided to craft a whole musical using them.
Her songs are about “people talking to each other, and sad, poetic things that people have written,” she said.
Cook will perform her one-woman off-Broadway musical, “The Writing on the Stall,” set in the bathroom of a dive bar, starting on Sept. 6 at the Soho Playhouse.
The last song of the show — titled “Conversations with Strangers” — pays homage to the anonymous exchanges on bathroom walls.
One comical heart-to-heart she used in the ballad starts with “Do you idealize the past? Or see it as broken? Why?”
Aluminum Honeycomb Sheet The person who replied said, “Dude, I’m just trying to take a s–t.”