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And they were incredibly cheap—eight or ten dollars at most for a regular manicure.
    Soon everyone was getting manicures. If your nails weren’t manicured (as opposed to merely clean), you felt ungroomed. You felt ashamed. You felt like sitting on your hands. And so it became necessary to have manicures once a week. Which brings me, alas, to pedicures.
    The best thing about a pedicure is that most of the year, from September to May to be exact, no one except your loved one knows if you have had one. The second best thing about a pedicure is that while you’re having your feet done, you have the use of your hands and can easily read or even talk on a cell phone. The third best thing about a pedicure is that when it’s over, your feet really do look adorable.
    The worst thing about pedicures is that they take way too much time and then, just when you think you’re done, you have to wait for your toenails to dry. It takes almost as long for your toenails to dry as it does to have a pedicure. So there you sit, for what seems like eternity, and finally you can’t stand waiting one more minute so you gently slip on your sandals and leave and on the way home you absolutely ruin the polish on your big toe and since your big toe is really the only thing anyone notices as far as your feet are concerned, you might as well not have had a pedicure in the first place.
    Unwanted Hair
    I’m sorry to report that I have a mustache. The truth is, I probably always had a mustache, but for years it was sort of dormant, or incipient, or threatening, in the way a cloudy sky threatens to rain. On a few occasions in my younger years it turned dark and stormy, and when it did, I dealt with it by going to the drugstore and buying a much-too-large jar of something called Jolen creme bleach. (I always tried to buy a small jar of Jolen creme bleach, but no one stocks it, for the obvious reason that it costs less than the big jar.) This trip to the store was usually followed, almost immediately, by the discovery of several other barely used, perfectly good much-too-large jars of Jolen creme bleach, which turned out to have been right there all along, under the bathroom sink, where I had just looked for them—I swear I had—and yet didn’t see them. Jolen creme bleach turns the mustache on your upper lip to the exact color of Richard Gephardt’s hair, which is better than its looking like Frida Kahlo’s mustache, but it’s still slightly hairier than you mean it to be.
    But then, along came menopause. And with it, my mustache changed: It was no longer dormant, incipient, and threatening; it was now just plain there. Fortunately, at the time, I was going to a lovely Russian-born hairdresser named Nina on the Upper West Side of Manhattan who, as it turned out, specialized in something called threading, a fantastic and thrilling method of hair removal she had learned in Russia and which, as far as I can tell, is the only thing the Russians managed to outdo us at in fifty years of the cold war. Threading involves thread—garden-variety sewing thread—a long strand of which is twisted and maneuvered in a sort of cat’s cradle configuration so as to remove hair in a way that is quick and painful (although not, I should point out, as painful as, say, labor). The results last about a month.
    For a long time, threading seemed like a wonderful and not particularly burdensome addition to my maintenance regime. Nina did my hair twice a week, so it took only five additional minutes for her to thread my mustache—plus, of course, ten additional minutes to thread my eyebrows, not that I needed my eyebrows threaded because my bangs are so long you can’t even tell whether I have eyebrows, much less whether they need weeding. But as long as Nina was doing the mustache it seemed to her (and let’s face it, to me) that she might as well do the eyebrows too. Having your eyebrows threaded is much more expensive and much more painful (although not, I should