Back in the 1950's, we took our children to movies every Saturday night at Cherokee, OK. Quite often, I had to usher at least one of them to the ladies room. I was appalled when I saw lipstick prints and smears on the wall beside the sink. Some of the young girls and perhaps some not so young, had kissed and smeared their excess lipstick on the wall. They ignored the tissue that the manager, Fred Householder, had so graciously provided for such use. I thought it was really disrespectful of them as well as a disgusting sight to see. Fred, a good friend of ours, said he did not know what to do to stop it.
Fred remodeled the movie theater and soon after, we went there for the first time after the remodeling was finished. When I entered the new ladies room I saw a large red circle about 8 inches in diameter painted on the side of the wall above the sink. I thought "How smart Fred is." This stopped the smearing for quite a while. Sometime later I went back and the smears were back on the wall just outside of the red circle. I made a comment to Fred about the incident. He told me that the only solution he could come up with, was to paint the whole wall red and he was not about to do that. I have never been able to understand why people throw waste just outside of a trash can, grind cigarette butts out on the floor or spit gum out on the floor. A few years later the theater burned down with the lipstick and all. The lipstick problem was finally solved!
This reminded me of the fictional story about a school janitor who was tired of cleaning the lipstick prints off of the bathroom walls. He complained to the superintendent and they came up with a plan to help remedy the situation. They gathered the girls and sent them to the bath room to show them how hard lipstick prints were to remove. The stage was set… the janitor dipped his mop into the toilet stool and mopped away at the wall prints. A few verbal utterances were heard from the girls, as the janitor and superintendent smiled. The lesson was over and no more lipstick prints were seen after that.