Everyone is talking about the bathroom: Peeping Tom-ette tells of an interlude in the stalls
by Beth Teitell

Thursday, August 23, 2001

No matter how much you like your job, there are moments that make you wonder - or at least should make you wonder - what you're doing with your life.

Which is not to say I didn't enjoy staking out the ladies room at Mantra, the new restaurant in the Ladder District (nee Downtown Crossing). It's just that after spending 40 minutes crouched on the loo, I began to question my chosen profession. (And why I'd spent $100 on a pink purse that matched nothing I own, but that's a personal, not a job-related, issue.)

It was the week Madonna was in town, but I can't even pretend I was there hoping to snag her not washing her hands, or checking out her tush in the mirror.

No, my prey were regular women.

I don't know if you've heard about Mantra's bathrooms, but the stalls have doors with one-way mirrors. When you're sitting on the toilet, you can look right through the door out to the sink area, while the women on the other side see only a mirror when they look at the stall doors.

The lavatories have been getting a lot of buzz, so the idea was to put the Herald's finest on the job and check them out first-hand.

Well, even for a trained journalist like myself, this was no easy assignment. After 15 minutes my legs began to cramp. But when I stood to stretch, I unwittingly set off the automatic flush and blew my cover: How long can you remain in a stall post-flush without attracting attention?

As time passed, and a variety of women came in, one thought went through my mind: Only a man could have come up with this gimmick.

Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against men or the restaurant - the food I grabbed off a patron's plate on my way to ``work'' was delicious - but what woman really wants to watch other women putting on lipstick or tucking in their shirts?

At least on the night I was there, none of the women who walked into my web did anything of interest (although I'm not sure what would be of interest).

When I returned to my office the next day (stepped back to my desk, so to speak), I called Mantra and asked to talk with the bathroom's designer. I received a call from Nader Tehrani, a person with a deep voice. ``Aha!'' I thought, a man. Only later did it emerge that his partner's name is ``Monica.'' ``Is that a woman?'' I asked, disappointed.

Why the peep show? I wanted to know.

Tehrani explained how the one-way mirrors ``play on certain ideas about certain rituals'' and ``reveal the artifice.''

When I asked about the benefit of such a revelation, he posed a rhetorical question: ``What is voyeurism about? It's a form of spectacle.''

Speaking of spectacle, during my research, I worried that the one-way mirror stuff would wear off, or somehow malfunction, and that I'd been snagged sitting on the toilet, fully dressed, taking notes.

``What if it stops working?'' I asked Tehrani. I thought he'd talk about how the mirror was made to military specifications and couldn't break, but that wasn't the case.

It turns out that if the lighting is changed so that the sink area becomes dimmer and the stall brighter, one could actually see in. An exhibitionist with a flashlight could have a blast.

``Where's the light switch?'' I asked.

``Nowhere we'd tell you,'' he said.

Hey, what does he think I am? Some kind of creep who'd sit on a toilet spying on women?