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point out, as painful as labor), and causes you to sneeze uncontrollably. But that’s a small price to pay. In fact, the cost of threading is a small price to pay for the smooth and lovely result.
    Unfortunately, though, a couple of years ago, I moved away from the Upper West Side to the Upper East Side of Manhattan, taking my mustache with me but leaving behind Nina and her compelling geographical convenience. So now I must add the travel time (and cab fare) to the cost of threading.
    On the other hand, where unwanted hair is concerned, I’m duty-bound to report that I spend considerably less time having myself waxed than I used to because (and you don’t see a whole lot of this in those cheerful, idiotic books on menopause) at a certain point, you have less hair in all sorts of places you used to have quite a lot. When I was growing up, I had a friend who was a pioneer in waxing—she first had her legs waxed when she was fifteen, and this was in 1956, when waxing was really practically unknown. She assured me that if I didn’t start getting my legs waxed—if I persisted in simply shaving like all the other commoners in the world—the hair would grow in faster and faster and faster and faster and eventually I would look like a bear. This turns out not to be true. You can shave your legs for many years, and they don’t really get a whole lot hairier than when they started. And then, at a certain age, they get less hairy. My guess is that by the time I’m eighty, I will be able to handle any offending hair on my legs with two plucks of an eyebrow tweezer.
    As for waxing what I like to call my bikini, it has become but a brief episode in what the fashion magazines refer to as my beauty regimen, and owing to my ability to avoid wearing a bathing suit except on rare occasions, I rarely need to do it anymore. (In the old days, however, a bikini wax was not just painful—it was truly as painful as labor. I dealt with the pain by using the breathing exercises I learned in Lamaze classes. I recommend them highly, although not for childbirth, for which they are virtually useless.) I understand that some young women have their pubic hair removed entirely, or shaped, like topiary, into triangles and hearts and the like. I am too old for this, thank God.
    Speaking of the pain of labor, which I seem to be, I would like to interject a short, irrelevant note: Why do people always say you forget the pain of labor? I haven’t forgotten the pain of labor. Labor hurt. It hurt a lot. The fact that I am not currently in pain and cannot simulate the pain of labor doesn’t mean I don’t remember it. I am currently not eating a wonderful piece of grilled chicken I once had in Asolo, Italy, in 1982, but I remember it well. It was delicious. I can tell you exactly what it tasted like, and except for the time when I returned to the restaurant six years later and ordered it again (and it turned out, amazingly, to be exactly as wonderful as I remembered), I have never tasted chicken that was crisper, tastier, or juicier. The song has ended, but the melody lingers on, and that goes for the pain of labor—but not in a good way.
    Exercise
    I would like to be in shape. I have a friend who gets up every morning at 5 a.m. and essentially does a triathlon. I’m not exaggerating. She is Ironwoman. She lifts weights. She runs marathons. She bicycles for hours. Last summer she took swimming lessons, and within a week she was talking about swimming around the island of Manhattan. A few summers ago I decided to do some swimming, and within a week I had swimmer’s ear. Have you ever had it? It’s torture. Water rattles around in your ear and itches so much that it wakes you up at night, and there’s absolutely no way you can scratch it short of plunging your finger into your brain stem. My own theory about Van Gogh is that he cut off his ear because he’d made the mistake of taking up swimming.
    In any case, I would like to be in shape. I would. But