.

Mobile shaving is my new ya-ya. It started with shaving at the gym, then spread to shaving in an airplane bathroom right before landing after a 14-hour flight to Tokyo, and now that I've caught my first shave in an airport lounge shower, I have a simple question:

Where have airport lounge showers been all my life?!

Why don't people talk about taking showers in the "president's club" or "officer's club" or whatever your paricular airline calls its VIP (Virtually Infinite Pretzels for Vaguely Irritated Potentates) lounge?

I finally joined one of these a few years ago, but I've never really used these lounges for anything beyond popping peanuts into my pie-hole and using the free WiFi, and sometimes changing clothes in the bathrooms, which you can't really do in the ones strewn throughout the terminals without, like Seinfeld, having to throw away whatever clothing happens to touch the floor.

But I never showered in an airport lounge. I didn't even know they had showers in these things, till a well-traveled friend told me about it. It's such a great idea -- a shower at the airport! You've got your clothes and Dopp kit right there in your luggage. It couldn't be more perfect. Okay, free bacon would be more perfect. I get sick of bagels and apples. Would it kill them to put out some bacon? Even just jerky would be huge.

So Sunday, when I arrived at Newark after a long shoot Saturday night and no sleep since Friday, I decided to recharge with a nice hot shower and a shave before getting my car and driving home. You can't just waltz into the men's room in the lounge and grab a shower -- you ask the person at the reception desk, who then leads you over to the special shower bathroom and hands you a couple of towels (decent, kind of bleachy smelling WHICH IS GOOD CONSIDERING).

Showered, toweled, and went in for the kill. I had my Dopp kit with me, of course, so I caught a gentleman's shave with all the trimmings -- Gillette Super Speed loaded with a Swedish DE blade, Merkur silvertip travel brush, Taylor's Shaving Shop cream. The only downside was the light-sensor activated faucet, which would only turn on if I waved my hand under the the faucet, and then I'd only get a few seconds of water per wave. So that sucked, but only a little. Kept things interesting, in a way. Shave and wave, shave and wave.

Let me tell you something, man and boy: leaving an airport right after deplaning from a long flight and leaving an airport after catching a hot shower and a nice shave are not variations on a theme. As long as I'm flying alone and time permits, I'm going to do this every chance I get from now on. Even though I hadn't slept in 2 days, I felt like a million bucks rolling my suitcase toward the parking garage, and for once, I didn't come home after a long trip looking like something the cat dragged in.

Finally, that $350/year starts making sense. I've spent that much on meals that didn't lift my spirits as much as that shower and shave did. Now I'm even thinking about driving over on a day I don't to fly anywhere, just for a pop-in.