The Larry Craig bathroom has become a tourist attraction.

Matt and I saw the first preview performance of The Ritz on Saturday night. This is a revival of a 1975 Terrence McNally farce about a member of a mob family who winds up hiding out in a gay bathhouse to escape a hit on his life.

I didn’t care for the show. In fact, parts of it really irritated me. I don’t know who decided that a revival of a dated 30-year-old play with jokes about “chubby chasers” was a good idea. The apex of my irritation occurred late in the second act when the show seemed close to the end but wound up going on for another 10-15 minutes. The show wasn’t all bad — I thought Brooks Ashmanskas (as a flamboyant bathhouse patron) and Rosie Perez (as an aspiring songstress) were particularly good, and there’s a funny sendup of Pippin in the second act. But overall I was disappointed.

Better entertainment came from the elderly couple sitting next to me. I felt bad for them because they seemed confused about what was happening on stage and didn’t seem to get most of the jokes. During the intermission I heard the husband trying to explain to the wife what a gay bathhouse was. “It’s like a spa for gay people,” he said.

Then I heard them conferring quietly about something. A minute later, the husband turned to me with his Playbill opened to the cast photos. He pointed to the photo of Brooks Ashmanskas. “Which one is he?” he asked me.

I pointed to the part of the stage where Ashmanskas’s character’s bathhouse room was located. “He’s the one who uses that room,” I said.

“Oh… the gay?” he said to me.

Um…

“They’re all gay,” I said.

“Well, the prominent gay.”

“Yeah.”

I turned back to Matt.

“You know you have to blog about this,” Matt said.

And thus…

I purposely didn’t blog anything about 9/11 yesterday. On past 9/11 anniversaries, I’ve sometimes blogged about it and sometimes not, but I think yesterday was the first time that I purposely refrained.

Yesterday felt like the most normal September 11 in a long time. We had our first chorus rehearsal of the season last night. At first, a few weeks ago, it was weird to see that our first rehearsal would be on September 11, 2007, and I wondered if that was appropriate. But then I thought, you know what? Enough. It’s just another day of the year. We shouldn’t be held hostage to the calendar.

Sure, I thought about the day at certain points. I recorded MSNBC in the morning, because it was rerunning the NBC TV coverage from that morning six years ago and I wanted to save it (which I’d meant to do when it was aired last year). And I thought about my friend Doug. And after work I returned a library book at the Jefferson Market branch on 6th Avenue and 10th Street, the same intersection where I first found out six years ago what was happening. It gave me a little shiver. And at night, from our apartment window, we could see the twin beams of light shining up from Lower Manhattan.

But I don’t know what I could have said yesterday that wouldn’t have been either mawkish or callous. While the New York Times and Washington Post websites gave top coverage to the Petraeus hearings, CNN.com’s main story yesterday morning said something like, “Six Years Later: We Remember.” That “we remember” that made me want to barf. The sentimentalization of it all. As in, if you don’t cry today, you’re not a good American. Just give us the news! Don’t try to tell us what we’re feeling.

Life continues.