One of my favourite sitcoms is Neighbourhood, featuring Cedric the Entertainer and Tichinia Arnold. Cedric’s facial expressions are a gem and Arnold is hilarious.
Remember her from Martin and Everyone Hates Chris? She even appeared in season 3 of the popular local series Lockdown alongside Lorcia Cooper, Dawn Thandeka King and Nomsa Buthelezi. In the sitcom, Cedric and Arnold play a married couple living in a predominantly black area whose new neighbours are a white couple.
The men are not as successful in forging a friendship as the women. Anyway …
In one episode of the premiere season, Arnold’s neighbour, played by Beth Behrs, takes a shower in Arnold’s home because they have plumbing issues and the men are trying their darnedest to sort them out.
She has the time of her life using a washcloth, what we call a waslap, for the first time to take a shower.
Whoever does not know the joys of using waslap, will never experience the sheer pleasure of having two – ahem – one for the face or upper body and another for the rest.
Or the maddening feeling of having a neighbour rub salt into a gaping wound by hanging their Buccaneer washing cloth to dry in a prominent spot after an upsetting loss for Amakhosi.
Or the frustration of buying the same waslap and having to decide on who will have to take the effort to mark theirs to distinguish it from the other. And the one who usually volunteers to personalise theirs is the one who cares the most about the condition of their waslap.
And the method of the least effort is to snip off or distort the label on the washcloth. It is a good idea until the other person cannot find theirs or it is in such a bad condition that they decide to snip off the label in yours and voila!
A waslap can be a source of conflict. Even in the sitcom, Arnold’s joy of introducing her neighbour to the facecloth was short-lived when she realised that she had dumped the wet cloth into the washing basket after using it.
And hell hath no fury like a pissed off person who has access to your waslap.
Ask those who have found their sisters, brothers, girlfriends, boyfriends, husbands, wives, brothers, in-laws wiping off the floor with their waslap and to be told “oh sorry, I thought it was a skroplap”.
A waslap is such a sensitive piece of material that even rapper Khuli Chana told us – before he got married – that when he’s got a new lover, he lets her “use his toothbrush and his roll-on”. He didn’t say anything about his waslap.
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