Waxer Beware!

Summer means one thing: swimming. Whether it be the beach or the pool, a tidy "down there" region is a must. Be warned, dear reader: while glossing through Gawker I found a frightening article about getting waxed. I have said it before, and I will say it again....leave the Brazilians to the professionals. If a place is charging less than $60 in NYC then I would steer clear. Best bets are the J. Sisters or Bliss. A friend of mine in Chicago went to some shady place and ended up having a patch of ingrown hairs that did not go away for over a YEAR. Be careful...it's a jungle out there either way!

Bikini Wax Disasters on Gawker

You know it's Gay Pride in NYC when.....2

Someone got a good workout before the Pride parade on Sunday! Maybe this is Lance Armstrong's gay brother....Actually, I think he is the long lost twin of the famed silver leggings man at my holiday party. He should probably buy stock in American Apparel now.

You know it's Gay Pride in NYC when.....

You know it's Gay Pride in NYC when your waiter at brunch is wearing a rainbow weenie wrapper. This has to be a health code violation.

Who wants a saggy ass and camel toe??!!

7th Avenue has to be freaking kidding me if they think this 70's boho trend is going to catch on. Have these people seen Dazed and Confused?? Not only did those jeans require a pair of pliers to zip up, but the high-waist makes everyone look like they have a perpetual camel toe and that their ass is droopy and two feet long. I admit I was a late adopter of the skinny jeans, but at least those make your legs look super long and skinny. How do you even begin to digest food with pants that high? These are the like trendy "mom jeans" without the tapered ankles. I am going to have to draw the line. Sorry fashion, but I am spitting in your eye.

Style.com is really stretching here with the 70's thing.

Hillary Clinton looking like a raisin

Sweet Jesus! Get thee to the dermatologist immediately. I can hear the cash register ca-chings reverbating.....Hillary Clinton needs some injections stat! Bring on the peels, lasers, plumpers, fillers, and botox. We can't have the woman who could potentially represent the free world and the youth-obsessed, grossly consumeristic American public looking like that!

Man-Zillian......a New Frontier

Finally guys are getting the hint. Take a cue from the gays and get that mess taken care of. Guess what.....if us chicks are expected to be all spic and span down there, you should at least return the favor. Thanks.

The man-zillian craze is growing!

Rats at Pinkberry!

Pinkberry is easily the new Magnolia Bakery with scores of people lining up around the corner for a cup of sweet, swirly goodness.......looks like they may get an unexpected dose of rat turd toppings! YUM! Rats Invade Pinkberry Yogurt Shop

Last Edited: Sunday, 17 Jun 2007, 8:52 PM EDT

Created: Sunday, 17 Jun 2007, 8:50 PM EDT

MyFoxNY.com -- Pinkberry's frozen yogurt is popular with people -- and rats. The vermin were seen scurrying around the Upper East Side store Sunday morning. Rats were also a few from the yogurt machine, and that's not far from bins of fresh fruit toppings. Owners said they shocked by the discovery and have since sanitized all their New York outlets. However, word of the mice didn't seem to stop people from lining up outside the shop, which is on 82nd Street and Second Avenue. A few months ago, cameras captured swarms of rats inside a KFC/Taco Bell in the West Village. The Health Department closed that eatery.

Burlesque Beauties in the Lower East Side

I have said it a million times. There is something for everyone in New York City. I have always been quite fascinated by burlesque performers (maybe it was watching Gypsy too many times as a kid), so a random Friday night calls for an equally random activity. The Slipper Room on the Lower East side has a burlesque show every Friday night complete with boobie tassels, fringe panties, and a smoking swearing host dressed as Jesus. Skip the pre-show that starts as 10:30....show up at 12 for the real action. The acts range from legit burlesque dancing to three chicks that looked like they blew through a few rails before performing a dance-team number to Christina's Dirrrty wearing construction outfits and pasties. Random. If you are looking for chicks with hot bods (a la Scores strippers) this is not for you. The girls are on the curvy side, but guess what, this is what real chicks look like.....no implants in this crowd. There was also a guy dancer who was like a creepy Boy George (the full frontal dose we got was a bit shocking). All in all it was a great time, and highly recommend to spice up your Friday night routine. Who doesn't love sequined panties and boobie pasties. Hehe.

The Slipper Room

Summer: A User's Guide - Suzanne Brown

Are you a summerologist? My great friend, Suzanne Brown, has compiled all the amazing things about summer into her new book, Summer: A User's Guide. This book takes you back to when you were a kid, makes you want to wear flip flops all year, and stop taking everything so seriously! Come visit Suzanne in Union Square tomorrow, Saturday, June 16th from 11-1. And by all means, take off your shoes, run in the grass, and have fun god dammit! We only have a few months of the great weather left!

Summer: A User's Guide by Suzanne Brown

Social Security Office

Here is a little tip discovered in my workings of living in Manhattan. Going to the Social Security office sucks. It smells, the people are either 90 years old trying to scam Medicaid, can't speak English, or have obviously undiagnosed cases of mental illness. After two attempts at getting a replacement social security card (where I had to leave because I just could not wait any longer) I have found the prime time to go: Friday afternoon at 3:45. They stop taking new people at 4pm, so you have to at least make that cut off. Through past experience the people who work there have absolutely no sense of urgency in cranking through cases. That is, of course, unless it is Friday afternoon and they are all ready to leave. Before I waited an hour and a half to speak to someone....now I was out of there by 4:20. 35 minutes as compared to an hour and a half! At the end of the day on Friday they get everyone in the office to help go through people. Instead of just the 3 they have at the window, I think at one time they had 6 people helping out. Vundebar!

Celeb Sighting - Austin Scarlett of Project Runway

Heidi, and 5The Project Runway streak continues! 1st Laura Bennett, 2nd Michael Johns (not worthy of post), 3rd Angela Keslar (also not worthy), 4thth Michael Kors....and now Austin Scarlett!

Everyone remembers Project Runway's ultra flamboyant and hilariously feminine Austin Scarlett. I was at the Port Authority Bus Terminal yesterday (just about the most un-glam place you can be in the city besides the Social Security office) and I noticed that hair. Project Runways fans know the hair: coiffed within an inch of its life, highlighted, and perfect in every regard. I quickened my stride to get a glimpse. There he was in all his queenly glory: painfully skinny jeans, woven brown leather booties, tailored blazer, and purse (or murse and I like to call it when guys carry one). Wonder where he was taking the bus to.....

Austin Scarlett homepage

Man Down! Man Down!

You know how when you first got your driver's license, your mother told you that "you are never in too much of a hurry to get into an accident". Well, today I discovered that the same goes for being a pedestrian.

As any normal New Yorker, I wait for light to change half way in the middle of the street, I cross against the red hand if I feel I can safely make it in time, and going to a cross walk is sometimes really out of my way. Well, this morning I was making a mad dash to the train way far uptown (it is no secret in this city that some neighborhoods get much more love than others...just compare Park Avenue to, let's say 225th Street). I am usually quite quick and lithe when crossing, and as a bonus I was wearing flats today. Well, I was watching the traffic instead of where I was stepping and planted my foot right on the side of a pot hole. Man Down! Man Down! Terror, adrenaline, and embarrassment suddenly overtook my entire body. All I could think of was the bus and car coming towards me and I don't think I have ever scrambled so fast in my life to get out of that intersection.

It scared the shit out of me more than anything else, and thank God I escaped relatively unscathed. I did, however, tear my favorite jeans at the knee, my foot hurts, and I could possibly still have a little bit of Broadway stuck in my hand. The train I almost died over ended up being late, the raspberries I brought for breakfast are more on the pureed side, and I had to continue onto the train with people I see every day with a very bruised ego. I am lucky....it could have been so much worse. You gotta learn your lessons, then make lemonade out of the lemons: There will always be another train, and now I get to make cute cut-off bermudas.

Smoking makes you thin, doesn't it?

First it's underweight models, now it's magazine advertising. Where will the government draw the line in harassing the fashion industry? Congress has asked 11 leading women's magazines (including my beloved Vogue) to pull all cigarette advertising from their glossy pages. Did they ask any men's magazines? While they are at it, should they also pull ads for alcoholic beverages and fast food joints? In the world we live in today, cigarette advertising is really the least of our worries. Get a clue congress!

Check out the AdAge article

Celeb Sighting - Michael Kors

Being a huge Project Runway fan, I was super excited to spot Michael Kors (self-proclaimed king of American jet-set style) having a bite to eat at the restaurant across the street from Tortilla Flats in the Meatpacking District. Nothing compares to this sassy queen's appraisal of Project Runway contestants. In true Kors fashion, he was wearing aviators, a black t-shirt, and khaki pants. My friend spotted Hiedi Klum about 20 minutes before the Kors sighting, so I am going to assume the Project Runway divas were lunching together. Fab.

Celebrity Sighting - Adrian Brody

Spotted! Adrian Brody chatting on his cell phone on Green and Spring last night. Very hot, but shorter than I imagined. YUM!

The Puerto Ricans are Coming!

The Puerto Ricans are coming! The Puerto Ricans are coming! Just as Paul Revere warned Bostonians of the forthcoming British, I am warning New Yorkers that today is the Puerto Rican Day Parade. That's right...the annual Manhattan infiltration of wildly patriotic, raucous causing, and incredibly ghetto Puerto Ricans. I will try to snap some paparazzi shots of the worst offenders. Basically, you couldn't pay me to go above 14th Street today. So....run thee to Whole Foods immediately and stock up on bottled water, canned goods, candles, and flashlight batteries. It is time to hunker down and wait till the storm returns to the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens.

Lance Bass - Unable to control limbs

While perusing through Gawker today I found a little ditty pulled from the Post about my friend Jasen Kaplan. Gotta watch out for freshly outed ex-NSYNC'ers and their flailing arms....saw the stitches last weekend. Please tell me he was doing the Bye-Bye-Bye dance!

Scenes From A Ball

Heatherette's fantastical, Tinsley Mortimer-studded voyage to the Life Ball in Vienna occurred over Memorial Day weekend, as James Kurisunkal and his email aliases so reliably informed us, but it's taken the Post's Brian Niemietz until now to recover from the festivities enough to tell us about them. And oh, what a Ball it was!

Lance Bass accidentally smashed a champagne flute against a fellow partygoer's mouth while dancing wildly, thus requiring stitches. It wasn't until the next morning that the smashee, a makeup staffer on the trip, realized glass shards were embedded in his bleeding lip. Luckily, a dentist and volunteer organizer named Fernando was on hand to provide stitches.

Could this be the gayest paragraph ever to have appeared in the Post? All Cindy Adams columns excluded, of course.

Luna Park - Worst Marg in Manhattan

A brief stint at Luna Park this past weekend has dethroned all previous holders of the "Worst Margs in Manhattan" title. On a quest for delicious margaritas, my friends and I descended upon Luna Park (restaurant in the middle of Union Square). After being told by the maitre'd the kitchen was closed (I was starving) I decided to drink my lunch with a refreshing alcoholic beverage. We were seated by our incompetent waitress who told me the kitchen was open....as plates upon plates of food exited its door. She handed me a sparse menu, we ordered a pitcher of swirl margs, and waited in sweet anticipation of that first icy slurp. 30 minutes later....we got our glasses of water, I was informed that the kitchen was in fact closed until dinner, and a pitcher of regular margaritas was brought out. When we informed her the error she went back and poured a cup of the strawberry variety down the side of the pitcher. Being the only lady in the group, I got the first glass (with no strawberry...so much for swirl). I brought the glass to my lips.........and what I tasted was not my beloved margarita, but a combination of lemonade, Sweet Tarts, and no booze. Needless to say, we got up and left: pitcher with its dewy condensation still on the table. The quest for the margarita continued.....

Luna Park - Summer 2007 title holder for "Worst Margarita in Manhattan"

Maybe I am just becoming jaded by constantly watching the fashion scent, but 99% of the looks from last night's 2007 CFDA Awards are safe and boring. I think Oprah has worn that dress in every shade of the rainbow. There is a fine line between classy and mediocre and last night's frocks definitely border on the latter. C'est la vie. Every event needs a good fashion disaster to spice things up a bit...too bad Bjork wasn't there.

PS - Am I the only who thinks of Tory Burch as the Target of the luxury fashion world? Way to tap into the "masstige" market!

Full coverage of the 2007 CFDA Awards on Style.com

Naomi Campbell for W Mag - Fierce

This is fashionista gold. My friend Jordan tipped me off to this video on YouTube. He was the assistant on the cover shoot for the June issue of W magazine (holding the wind machine) and saw first hand Naomi Campbell rocking it like Tina Turner when they put on Proud Mary. Loves it!

Gramercy Park - The Gate Was Open!

Two mornings ago I was out power-walking like a soccer mom taking my usual loop down Broadway to Union Square, east on 14th street, and up Irving Place. While I was walking around Gramercy Park, I noticed the gate was open. Eureka! For those of you who don't know, Gramercy Park is a bastion of Manhattan snobbery. This is a park only available to those who are residents of the buildings on the perimeter streets or staying at the Gramercy Park Hotel. Those lucky few have keys to the gate; otherwise, plebeians not allowed inside.

Anyways, I decided that this was my chance to see the park up close and personal, so I took a lap around the meticulously landscaped gravel path. I was glowing in all my glory having outsmarted the grounds keepers who left the gate ajar and enjoying a truly beautiful May morning. As I rounded the corner and headed to exit I noticed my gate that was once open is now shut. Not a big deal right, as all things, it should open with no problem when you are on the inside. WRONG! The gate was totally locked. I am a prisoner in Gramercy Park! You need a key to enter and exit....does the fire marshall know about this? After a moment of panic and imagining the embarrassment of asking one of the other ladies to let me out I saw a groundskeeper sweeping the street. I called to him to come open the door. I was then reprimanded by a man who prunes bushes and picks up trash for a living for entering the "private park". Oh no he diiiiiiiiiiint. I was sure to let him know that it was probably his fault the gate was open, and not really my problem if I went inside because of his mistake. Whatever. I then went on my merry way back up to Chelsea, loving the fact that I sneaked into the most excluse park in NYC.

This article on Gawker about the rediculousness of Gramercy Park is HILARIOUS