Back when I was having sex on a fairly regular basis, I decided to get adventurous and change up my normal grooming regimen of letting things down there lie fallow until my muff grows so wild even a cheap disposable razor can’t hack it.

This wasn’t my first hair removal rodeo, so a bikini wax seemed quotidian. I wanted to go with the Brazilian.

The pain didn’t scare me — we women have built up a high tolerance after years of plucking, tweezing, brushing and blow-drying. My concern was the smorgasbord of options available to me, including vajacials, between-the-cheeks, everything-but-the-labia, frontal strips and body bling. A vagina is a rich tapestry, according to my research (and what is up with fashion and beauty magazines using halved fruit to illustrate our genitals? Lychees, peaches, grapefruit, avocados — Georgia O’Keeffe must be stirring in her grave).

I plucked up the courage to go totally bare and booked my appointment on a Saturday afternoon that was forecasted to be balmy enough to make the 20-minute trek to the salon on foot.

There, half-naked on the table, gripping my haunches and propping my legs up by invisible stirrups, I heard my esthetician’s muffled voice coming from somewhere below my waist to ask, “You don’t remember me, do you?”

Certainly not. I had been so nervous that I only offered the woman who was minutes away from seeing something only a handful of others have seen little more than a cursory glance. As it so happens, she too had gone to my parent’s church years ago. We had both unknowingly prayed together. And here she was, getting familiar with the most intimate parts of my body.

The relationship between waxer and waxee is sacred.

She ripped off the first strip and I saw dizzying stars. In an effort to take my mind off the sweat-inducing pain, we reminisced about the sermons that cautioned against premarital sex and vanity. I was grateful for her gracious sense of humour. My apparent long-lost homegirl instructed I go commando for the rest of the day to, I don’t know, let my raw pores breathe. I hastily stuffed the bedazzled thong — chosen for the same reason we brush our teeth before the dentist — into my purse, paid and tipped (always generously tip someone who grooms your nether regions), and got the hell out of there before my ego took another walloping.

Outside and all considered, the Brazillian wasn’t so bad. Then my cellphone started buzzing. I scrambled around in my purse to retrieve the phone before I lost the call, but with it came my sexy undies. I watched as the glittery pink blur was flung to the sidewalk, as if I had launched a slingshot, and land at the feet of a hot dad coming out of a grocery store with two toddlers. My cheeks turned a deeper purple than the pathetic-looking fold of cloth on the ground. I spun around immediately and sped off in the other direction, pretending not to hear him calling out behind me, “Miss, you dropped something!”

Where those dirty underwear are now shall forever remain a mystery; a fallen casualty.

A few nights later, the next guy to see me naked said, “It’s your body and you can do what you like, but I prefer a little something down there.”