As the world begins to look increasingly like a Terry Gilliam film, it's becoming difficult for women of a certain class to be massaged, coddled and waxed in public by women of a usually much lower class. Once oases of relaxation, now spas are riddled with "haughty employees [who] enforce strict policies about clients' behavior.. appointments [that] have to be confirmed a day ahead, or else." Etiquette! Confirmation! Quelle horreur! But there is a solution.

Thank God there's enough space in a certain type of woman's four bedroom Upper East Side apartment to accomodate a massage table, 300 thread count sheets, a bolster and some poor minority savvy or desperate enough not to let class resentment show on the face as they wax the vajayjays of the wealthy. But is there a lurking menace in those hands? Times Styles whatever and self-described "media savvy social satirist" Alix Strauss investigates.

The dangers are two-fold. One we might call situational; the other, hygienic. Take poor Kris Fuchs, 44.

Kris Fuchs, 44, used to love her downtime at the Mandarin or Tracie Martyn, so much so that she has a masseuse to come to her four-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side every Monday. Ms. Fuchs, a mother of two teenagers, admits that she no longer receives two hours of uninterrupted relaxation. Though there's plenty of space in the apartment, her children still find a way to interrupt the treatment that takes place in the family room.

"The kids come in and put their homework on me while I'm on the table," said Ms. Fuchs, an owner of Suite New York, a high-end furniture showroom. "Sometimes they joke around and massage my feet. At the spa, I'm not a mother or career person, but a woman. And you can never achieve that feeling at home with kids in the same room."

But the truer danger lurks not in problems like those of Ms. Fuchs, who sees an oppositional relationship between mother and woman, it's in the grubby little hands of those service workers kneading the woes of the world out of the necks of the wealthy. According to one expert, "Being on the road doesn't give therapists the chance to brush their teeth after eating or even wash their hands regularly." Oh right, because all those four-bedroom apartments don't have sinks! Just like in Brazil!

[Photo: Natasha Calzatti for The New York Times]