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Your support makes all the difference.THE WINNING star Gwyneth Paltrow (pictured) is the latest to succumb to the hottest new craze sweeping Planet Anglophone - the Brazilian Bikini Wax. You haven't heard? The Brazilian Bikini Wax is an absolutely rigorous intimate depilatory technique that reaches parts other treatments don't. Long popular with glamour models and blue-movie performers, the BBW also numbers Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington and Kirstie Alley among those who have come clean this week about their preference for this unusual personal grooming technique. "You changed my life!" Paltrow reportedly told the beautician who introduced her to the max wax. Oh, and Gwyneth also keeps a feng shui book by her bed...
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THE ROYAL National Institute for the Blind will launch SP, a new ladmag for guys with serious sight problems later this month. Good news: SP costs just 30p. Bad news: no Braille centrefolds.
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THE TEEN agony aunt and author Sophie Parkin, who publishes her new novel Take Me Home this week, was a five-year-old child model for Crimplene. The experience may have warped her for life. "I will not wear natural fibres next to my body," she said at the Chelsea Arts Club this week. Hmmm, Pandora can feel a wardrobe inspection coming on...
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DO SVEDANYA Hungry Duck? As eagle-eyed Independent readers will know from our Business Review, Moscow's legendary centre of decadence will shutter on 30 April. But Moscow's loss may be Minsk's gain - club boss Doug Steele says he may franchise the Duck there. Its entertainment policy guarantees excitement: freebies entice the glossiest talent; once young femmes cross the threshold they enjoy two hours of free drinks and a striptease and are encouraged to dance on the bar in "spontaneous" erotic performances. Only then does Steele admit guys. But a group of politicians from the Duma dropped in unexpectedly - and discovered a burly male Nigerian ecdysiast on the bar with a female customer... as the sound system blasted out the national anthem. What will Minsk's moralists make of this? Belarus is a police state and Steele blames the closure on "that whole communist mentality".
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PANDORA'S LITTLE book of doom falls open today at... the Welsh Secretary Alun Michael. The number plate on his election battle bus is NIL.
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THE BEAT goes on - north of the Border, politics and music go together like gin and treacle. First we had New Lab recycling Kinnockio's "Altogether Now" by the Farm. Scots Tories, 200-1 outsiders, have opted for M People's "Movin' On Up", more hip replacement than hip, as the optimistic sound- track to boost their electoral run. Could the SNP's shaky break from the electoral stalls be related to the party's choice of the distinctly dodgy "Caledonia"? Sample lyric: "I've been afraid that/ I might drift away... Now that I'm sitting here before the fire.../ the flames that couldn't get any higher - they've withered now they've gone." Maybe the Lib Dems were right to opt for the sounds of silence.
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COMPUTER GAME wars. Two tiny computer firms, Connectix and Bleem, are squaring up to the Japanese-controlled consumer electronics giant Sony. The Silicone valley hotshots have devised pounds 28 emulators that allow PC owners to enjoy PlayStation games without buying Sony's pricey platform. Sony's response? Injunctions. Coming soon to a console near you: Lara Croft, patent lawyer.
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TESSA JOWELL, Minister for Public Health, was keynote speaker at a champagne reception at The Ivy this week. The topic? Alcohol awareness
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OVERHEARD AT Che during Helena Christensen's Nylon party - Photographer: "Look honey, we should talk." Agent: "Greg, we are talking."
Contact Pandora by e-mail: pandora@independent.co.uk
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