Once I locked myself in the bathroom, planning to jump out the window, swinging on a tree branch like Tarzan or Jane in old jungle movies. I was young then.

Never before had I been locked in the bathroom by mistake. I had just taken a shower and was looking forward to our December Linden Hills Ladies Libation event.

As I nonchalantly went to open the bathroom door the old-fashioned glass doorknob fell off. No screw showed up to hook it back in place. I was stuck. Nail files, tiny scissors, and anything else sharp I could fit in the empty space, where the doorknob had lived, proved frustrating to use as escape items.

I took breaks from poking around in the doorknob inners. Squats, leg lifts, donkey kicks, and myriad exercises ensued. As did fingernail and toenail clipping. I found a bottle of nail strengthener to apply to my fingernails. I attempted meditation. That didn’t work.

“Remain calm,” I told myself.

My friend Judy arrived to pick me up for the ladies’ event. She rang the doorbell. Usually I’m standing outside when she drives us to parts of the city I’m unfamiliar with. We joke about going out drinking, and the time I drove over a curb following TWO glasses of Prosecco.

“Help, help!” I cried. “Come downstairs, I’m locked in the bathroom.” She didn’t hear me.

“Maybe I would have heard you if I came to the side door,” Judy opined. She called Marc to alert him, or indeed, to discover if both of us had befallen to “a situation.” He didn’t answer his phone.

Speculation arose among the Ladies Libration members.

“Did Sheila have a heart attack?

“Are they in the hospital (I sure hope they weren’t going to start calling every hospital in town).”.

“Did their house burn down?”

My LL friends were concerned. Apparently, they entertained themselves with their own locked out/or in stories.

Two hours later, when Marc returned from his dog psychologist appointment with Barkly, I called the ladies to tell them what happened.

I heard the laughter in the background when someone announced my plight.

From now on I will take my phone into the bathroom, just not in the shower, of course. I will leave a book there, adding to the places I never go without someone else’s story beside me.