FORCED INTIMACY Alehouse’s window to the soul BY SARA DONNELLY

Portland’s biggest little dive bar, the Alehouse, has given us all new reason to feel dirty. In March, owner Russ Riseman completed some renovations on the bar, including work on the bathrooms to make them, as he says, more "sanitary." No more grimy, broken stall doors. The white walls are actually white again. Hell, Riseman even splurged on a couple of soap dispensers. But, lest you get too carried away with the bathroom decadence and forget you are in, ahem, one of the 20 best dives in America according to Stuff Magazine, Riseman left a curious little calling card.

It’s a window, about the size of mailbox, between the women’s bathroom and the men’s bathroom. There’s no glass in it, and no curtain that we could find. Oh yeah, and it’s positioned at eye-level above the women’s sink and, on the guy’s side, why, just above the urinal of course. Sadly for some, the angle’s all wrong to catch a glimpse of anyone’s genitals. But it is positioned perfectly for those in search of a soulmate.

"This was meant to be a conversation piece," says Riseman of his window. "You’re in a loud bar and you step away for a second and somebody from the opposite sex is right there in front of you and you can strike up any kind of conversation you want. Perhaps it’s an ice breaker for when you leave the room. It’s designed to titillate the imagination, not the actual senses."

Reactions to the window have been mixed. Curiously, says Riseman, men seem more uncomfortable with the idea than women. He thought it’d be the other way around. But a little undercover work shows that Riseman’s prediction was indeed wrong. Most men peering through the window were at a loss for words one recent Saturday night, save an awkward, "Um, this is kind of weird. Wow. It’s over the sink on your side? Are you kidding me? Um, yeah, I’m taking a leak on this side." Women, however, seemed to really enjoy the gag, if reaching their hands through the window and calling all their friends in to laugh and point means anything. But perhaps the strangest interaction the window forced was between people who tacitly agreed to ignore the situation altogether. After the excitable drunks left the bathroom that night, two women stood waiting for the stall, backs pressed against the wall, staring pointedly at anything that was not the window. Every minute or so a new pair of eyes gazed through the gap from the other side. No words were exchanged. Toilets flushed, hands were washed, but no one said anything.

These were intimate moments worthy of a Merchant Ivory film.

Riseman says he lifted the idea from the bathroom of a dive bar in Manhattan’s East Village, where the windows were, predictably, positioned closer to people’s goods. Luckily for good old-fashioned conversation, Riseman modified the original for Portland audiences (everyone knows friends before lovers works best anyway).

"Fancy meeting you here" has never been so apropos.