A night spent stuck in the Britney zone

Imagine that you are spending the night in a luxury hotel in downtown Boston. Your deluxe room has a top-of-the line audio-visual system with a 42-inch-wide, high-definition, plasma-screen TV. That is the good news.

But the system is on the blink. It plays only one DVD: Britney Spears's "In the Zone." It is supposed to get cable and broadcast TV, but it doesn't work. Julian Miller comes up from the front desk; he has fixed this problem before. But not this time.

So you won't be watching "SportsCenter" or "CSI: Especially Grisly Deaths" tonight. Just Britney swinging her 22-year-old tush with the Ying Yang Twins, over and over.

Welcome to the fourth circle of hell, the one where you are condemned to a life of useless labor. Welcome to the $349-a-night Britney Spears room at the Onyx Hotel.

How awful is the Britney Spears mini-suite? My wife made two comments immediately after she walked through the door. (1) "This is tiny!" then (2) "This is disgusting." Is 225 square feet tiny? Well, for $349, it feels a little small. And "disgusting" may be too strong a word, although it happens to be the one she chose. I might have said tacky.

Let's back up a bit. The Onyx's B.S. room sprang from a bit of public relations serendipity. Earlier this year, Spears was about to embark on her "Onyx Hotel Tour," celebrating a fictional Onyx Hotel "where wondrous dreams are realized, and the darkest of secrets are revealed." (The tour was interrupted after Spears injured her knee.)

It so happened that the Kimpton hotel chain was opening a real Onyx Hotel in Boston. Instead of suing each other for naming rights, Kimpton and the jiggly pop tart struck a deal: Britney agreed to create and promote a celebrity-themed room at the Onyx, like the J. Garcia Suite at Kimpton's Hotel Triton in San Francisco. The room is formally called the Britney Spears Foundation Room, and the hotel donates 10 percent of the room revenues to Spears's charity, which operates a performing arts camp on Cape Cod, among other things.

So last month, with no small amount of fanfare, Spears hopped up to Boston, whipped out a magic

marker, and autographed the wall of the room intended to look like her girlhood lair. There is one difference between the Onyx room and the room she grew up in: Britney has never spent a night at the Onyx. After vamping for the press, Spears cut out for New York and then Los Angeles to marry for the second time in her relatively brief stay on the planet. There is some doubt as to whether she actually married dancer Kevin Federline, but that, as they say, is another story. So what are the digs like? Designed by Britney's mother, Lynne, they purport to resemble part of the family homestead in Kentwood, La. The decor looks like someone's design scheme for a high-end New Orleans brothel, which is not to suggest that either Ms. Spears or I have first-hand knowledge of that environment.

Is it possible that Britney's girlhood room had gilt curlicues on the ceiling, a gold dust ruffle on her bed, and no hangers for skirts in the closet? Or the same Maya Romanoff-design "Bedazzled" wall covering favored by Elton John? Certainly some of the posher design features, such as the bathroom's black marble floor and countertops, reflect the more mature, I'll-kiss-Madonna-for-publicity-"shock"-value Britney. The room is stocked with a few of Britney's oddly toxic favorite things, such as Cheetos, Starburst candy and, yes, Pop-Tarts.

Hotel officials say the room has been quite a hit with the teen girl bopper crowd. Operations manager Martin Horkan says it has been booked about four nights a week, generally as a birthday favor or a mother-daughter bonding experience. Like every other guest, I signed a waiver agreeing not to steal Britney's platinum records off the wall ("We've got them nailed down pretty well," another Onyx staffer told me) or the girly bibelots, e.g. a pink calfskin mini-Bible stored in a locked curio cabinet near the bed. "So far, everything is still there," Horkan said.

Is it possible to say anything nice about the B.S. Foundation Room? All guests receive publicity photos signed by Britney; I suspect I might net a few bucks for those on eBay. The Onyx seemed perfectly nice. I would happily stay in any other of its deluxe rooms, which seem to have been furnished by residents of Planet Earth.

It's true that one couldn't imagine eating in the narrow confines of the B.S.F.R., but my wife and I did enjoy a tasty breakfast in the downstairs Ruby Room. By that time our mood was high, with Britney's vulgarian rhapsody solidly planted in our rearview mirror.

Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.