She finds inspiration during her bathroom breaks.
Bed-Stuy resident Caitlin Cook wrote a whole musical based on quotes she found scrawled on bathroom stalls.
After college, the art history major grew bored with how pretentious that world might be, and have become fascinated with bathroom graffiti.
“I loved the concept that in the event you take all that elitism away, you only have people trying to speak with one another,” Cook, 33, told The Post.
She first found inspiration in a dive bar in Chicago: “Writing on toilet partitions is neither for critical acclaim nor financial reward. It’s the purest type of art.”
Thus began her 10-year seek for quotes scribbled in restrooms in places like Australia, Recent 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 depart him,’” she said.
Men’s stalls are inclined to have more lewd drawings than motivational messages. “There’s definitely quite 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 a few 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 began going viral.
A recent video of hers — that already has 1 million views — included the conversation she captured in a stall in England that began 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 feel there’s less in Europe because they clean up their bathrooms a bit more; they’ll paint over it more often,” Cook observed.
“But there tends to be more political stuff there.”
People now send her bathroom graffiti they’ve stumbled upon — and she will receive 50 photos a day from people in as far-off as South Africa.
“Oh, this one’s great, ‘A number of girls carry knives while they be pooping,’ and it’s just carved with a knife into the lavatory,” she said of 1 sent to her via Instagram.
Some make confessions:
“After I’m alone I wish to fill the tub 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 together with her favorites — which she called “The Purest Type of Art.”
It garnered such positive feedback that she decided to craft an entire musical using them.
Her songs are about “people talking to one another, and sad, poetic things that individuals have written,” she said.
Cook will perform her one-woman off-Broadway musical, “The Writing on the Stall,” set in the lavatory of a dive bar, starting on Sept. 6 on the Soho Playhouse.
The last song of the show — titled “Conversations with Strangers” — pays homage to the anonymous exchanges on bathroom partitions.
One comical heart-to-heart she utilized in the ballad starts with “Do you idealize the past? Or see it as broken? Why?”
The one that replied said, “Dude, I’m just attempting to take a s–t.”
