Girlfriends Get a Magazine All Their Own

This is a girlfriend lunch, which can only mean two things--a slimming ahi tuna fest with a side dish of boy talk, bad-boy talk, clothes talk, hair talk and eyebrow talk.

Especially eyebrow talk.

“I met Courteney Cox a couple of years ago,” girlfriend Jane Pratt is saying over her tuna, cooked medium. “The first thing she did when she met me was redraw my eyebrows. She actually used a No. 2 pencil. That’s what she uses on her eyebrows, and I was like, ‘This girl, wow, she really knows.’

“So from then on it’s been a friendship based on a lot of things. A big part of it is I will call her when I do things like get some oil from Chinese food on my favorite suede bag. She was like, ‘Put some talcum powder on it. That will soak up the oil.’ ”

This is not a joke.

“She really knows. She’s not as much of a neat freak as her character [on “Friends”], but when it comes to household stuff, she’s like a tip meister. She totally wants to be a modern-day Heloise, and she is.”

But with better eyebrows.

OK, guys, you want to know what girlfriends talk about when you’re not around? Ask Jane. She’s a former media wunderkind. She’s a magazine. But above all, she’s a girlfriend, which has a trickle-down effect. Jane is a girlfriend magazine. Even the celebrities in it are girlfriends.

“A lot of what Jane is about is not putting celebrities up on a pedestal, but showing them as regular folks,” Jane says. “So I thought that would be a fun way to do it, to have her answer readers’ questions about what to do when you have a party and people get wax on your rug.”

We are chowing down on the terrace of Barney’s Greengrass in honor of Jane’s whistle-stop campaign to turn the country on to her eponymous magazine. Since the fledgling magazine’s constituency is chicks 18 to 34, we thought this would be a good opportunity to inspect the girl zeitgeist. We started with the cover of the February issue. Lead story? “The year’s 10 gutsiest women.”

You go, girlfriend.

“I wanted to honor women for taking chances and doing things that might not be popular at the moment--and not things that I necessarily commend. Certainly Monica Lewinsky is a perfect example. I’m not saying I back what she’s done, and I’m not saying I nominate her for intern of the year. But I do think she’s gutsy in many ways. Out of all the women I know, if I dared them the first time they met the president to show them their thong, how many women would really do that? And she did. She’s out there.”

So is her underwear. But hey, this isn’t your grandma’s magazine.

“My readers are the children of the first wave of feminists. Some of them had grandmothers who were feminists. They grew up assuming they could do whatever they wanted to do.

“It used to be that whole thing where you go from your parents’ home to your husband’s home and any period in between was a period to be hurried through because it’s an unpleasant state. You’re not worthy because you don’t have a husband and family of your own, and work wasn’t considered that important for women. Now there’s a whole new life stage--having sex with different people, really just enjoying that single state.”

Which makes the next question that much more pressing--what’s a girl to do about a shiny nose?

Courteney?

“She says if you don’t want to put more powder on or you don’t have powder, you take the toilet seat cover and press it, and it absorbs the oil.”

Girlfriend.

Irene Lacher’s Out & About column runs Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays on Page 2.