Get all glammed up with your man and head to the Oak Room at the Fairmont Copley Plaza, where gorgeous deep mahogany meets country club elegance. The Bill Laughlin Jazz Quartet performs on Friday and Saturday evenings at 8:15 p.m.

Once you’re there, flip through the encyclopedic cocktail menu. Turn to the back page, where you’ll find the $12,500 martini—just what you’ve been looking for. Drop the hint. Check his reaction.

The drink arrives with a sparkling engagement ring and includes one night booked in a suite, decked out with candlelight, romantic music, roses, and champagne, and tomorrow, breakfast in bed. The ring can be selected on the spot at DePrisco Diamond Jewelers, which has a storefront just steps away from the bar within the hotel.

If you’re really only going to have one drink. This would be the savor forever.

Oak Room, Fairmont Copley Plaza, 617-267-5300, theoakroom.com

But I have to admit—the $300,000 we’d originally agreed to is a paltry sum, in spite of the economic collapse, etc. So I’m telling you now: We need more cash.

I hope it’s okay that I unilaterally decided to nudge the lever a bit to the right for us, for you and me. Because although we’d originally agreed to keep things, well, under control, I can assure you that searching in Brookline, Allston, and Cambridge for a lovely 2-bedroom for under $400K can seem a little like trying to find a Prada bag at a yard sale.

I mean, I’m sure it happens, but not all the time, unless you run into a fakes sell-off in Everett just ahead of the police, but anyway, who wants a fake condo?

Oh, I agree with you—we want to come out of this looking like a couple of smarty-pants. We want our friends and family to be deeply envious of our hard-bargaining tactics and savvy scouting. But trust me, all of this sounds fine until you walk into a prospective Allston unit that smells like five unwashed college boys, and lo, there they are, using our prospective kid’s room as long-term storage for French fries and petrified socks.

I just can’t do that again. So here’s a proposal: I keep looking, but let’s just remember that renting isn’t the worst thing in the world. Sure I’d love to be a hotshot like the guy across the street—all homeowner-y and married, but I’ve gotten used to looking at our assets in the plus column. Does that work for you?

Looks like Bostonista won’t be just dancing with Gaga and commiserating over our misplaced keys and lost phones (send us your numbers, people!).

We did the same thing to Britney. So we had to make a play for Canada. When all else fails, go to Canada, right? Our friend is getting married in May, so our concert date turned into a Montreal “girl’s weekend” and bachelorette party (complete with our two fabulous gay man-friends).

The Britney concert was a full-fledged circus with tight rope walkers, contortionists, acrobats, and more. And even though Britney only said one sentence that wasn’t prerecorded, we were really only there to see her bejeweled costumes and the dances anyway.

The day after the Britney concert, we went shopping on St. Catherine Street (no, not for that kind of stuff). On a storefront window, we saw a poster of our other girl, Lady Gaga. We took one look at Gaga with her bleach blonde hair and big white sunglasses, and then we stared at our friend Amber,  also with her bleached blonde hair, slight frame, and sick abs. She was a dead ringer.

That day, we made it our mission to get Amber some big Gaga glasses to wear out that night. She found a pair with white frames that covered most of her face, put them on, and the resemblance was uncanny.

“That’s it, we’re riding like celebrities tonight,” she said. Bostonista loves playing celebrity. We once even faked our own paparazzi scheme.

Back in the hotel room, we got ready for dinner and a night out on the town. Amber zipped up a cropped white jacket and tucked her skinny jeans into shiny, black, thigh-skimming boots. With the glasses on, she was officially Gaga-fied.

Hey Nicole Ritchie did it. So why can’t we?

When she was ready, most of our entourage went down to the lobby of the hotel, while Amber/Gaga and two other friends stayed behind, and waited by the elevator. They delayed five minutes, to give us time to prepare downstairs.

Once in the lobby, we started talking to a group of ten guys that was standing near the elevators.

“Did you hear Lady Gaga is staying at this hotel?” we asked.

“No way, really?” one guy said. “She’s staying here?”

“Yeah we think we saw her waiting for the elevator upstairs. She’s coming down any minute,” we said, while getting our cameras ready for some action.

Minutes later, Amber/Gaga emerged from the elevator with her shades on and her head down, and our two fabulous man-friends quickly took on the roles of her “manager” and “publicist.”

We all started screaming. “Gaga! We love you!”

“It’s really her!” and we snapped her picture over and over again. We asked her to sign our gum wrapper and our receipts, because we “didn’t have any paper.”

The looks on the guys’ faces was priceless. They all started asking for her autograph and pictures, too.

“We thought you were just joking around, but it’s really her,” said one.

Our impersonation was completely successful. Even the concierge was giddy at the spectacle.

But little did we know that that same concierge, who had earlier hooked our large group up with dinner reservations at a fancy place, was quickly phoning the restaurant to where we were headed.

To give them a heads up about just “who” was coming to dinner that night.

Uh-oh.

We get it. Like a lover who just can’t get enough of our regular weekday rendezvous, you suffer from Bostonista separation anxiety between our daily(-ish) posts. To that we say, right back at you. We miss your sassy, knowing eyes and your spot-on comments. And now, we can finally make you sat-is-fied:

No longer must we have such a spotty, once-a-day relationship. Because, in addition, your girl Bostonista will now be posting quickies via Twitter. Follow us here at www.twitter.com/bostonista for savory bites of news, gossip, and musings from the pulse of the local style scene at all hours of the day.

Then along came foils. Foils are pain-free and gentler on the scalp. They also keep hair tidy while the dye does its job, and the heat lamp interacts with the foil to speed up the color process. But while you wait, you risk looking like a satellite, or like your mom trying to get a tan by the pool in the ’60s. Not to mention the waste. You can’t recycle that stuff.

The next innovation in hair color is Balayage.

Haven’t heard of it? It’s a European type of hair coloring that doesn’t use foils. Stylists simply paint the color on dry hair using a paint brush, and the results are spectacular. We had our first Balayage experience last weekend at Mizu at the Mandarin Oriental.

Our stylist, Caroline Robert (who has the cutest French accent and a lovely personality), sat us down to explain the process. She mixed two different dyes, then painted the color onto our dry strands in an alternating pattern. No foils needed. Just clips and an expert touch with the brush. It didn’t hurt that Robert is also a painter.

The process was quick, gentle, and didn’t cause any needless waste. Plus, we didn’t have to worry about anyone gawking at us metal-heads through the clear glass windows of the salon. After a cut and a blow dry, we were amazed at how natural our color looked. You couldn’t even tell we had a dye job.

Now that’s what we call hair artistry.

Mizu, Mandarin Oriental Hotel, 800 Boylston St., 617-585-6498, Mizuforhair.com

But we still maintain that everyone should buy Dirty Bow Wow…or at least flip through it at Borders. This delightful little book, by Boston-based design couple Cheryl and Jeffrey Katz, showcases local dogs and their playthings.

A follow up to their 2007 hit, Dirty Wow Wow (about children’s bedraggled toys and blankies), Dirty Bow Wow introduces us to Turbo, a one-eyed French Bulldog who won’t go anywhere without his stuffed alligator, and Rosaleen, an Irish Terrier with a deep affection for paper towels. There’s also Labradoodle Halle, who loves her completely deformed frisbee, and Amos, an aging golden retriever pictured with his longtime (headless) friend, Quacking Duck.

Inspired by their evening walks past the Common’s dog park, the Katzes selected the canine models, penned the mini-love stories, and asked local photographers Hornick/Rivlin to shoot them. The end result is a charmer that deserves a spot on even the biggest design snob’s coffeetable.

Dirty Bow Wow: A Tribute to Dogs and the Objects of their Affections by Cheryl and Jeffrey Katz (Ten Speed Press, 111 pages, $14.95)

Mesa Arts Center - Shauna Gillies-Smith of Ground for MSI (GroundInc.com)

This week we were invited to speak to an extraordinary group of women. Called the Design Salon Boston, this informal organization brings together interior designers, architects, product designers, and writers once a month to talk about their trade and figure out how to do what they do better. We met up at the groundbreaking architectural firm, Utile, hosted by principal Mimi Love.

It’s about time someone figured how to gather the creative types in the city, but I was a little wary of the women-only bent. Wary, that is, until I witnessed its merits first-hand.

Women have a different way of conducting business than men. They’re more direct, I think, and less interested in theory. They want information they can use, real world applications, and they want it now. Maybe men have their fathers to teach them the ways of the business world (or poker games), but most of us women are inventing our style as we go.

That means that many businesswomen are forthright and earnest. Kristen of Urban Living Studio, for example, is a lovely woman and very clear: she has several businesses based on local design and wants people to know about them. Kara Butterfield of Makeready Design is charmingly self-effacing but ready to bust out onto the design scene. Landscape architect Shauna Gillies-Smith of Ground in Somerville has international fame but little local recognition. Why?

We’re looking forward to joining this group again and following the successes of our fellow creative types. Boston is small enough that we can network easily. Now let’s use our collective power to put this city on the design map, one project at a time.

Ballet-inspired classes: Like the rest of the celeb-following world, we’ve been intrigued by trainer-to-the-stars Tracey Anderson’s dance/Pilates hybrid workouts ever since client Gwyneth started showing off her legs on red carpets everywhere. As we wait for Anderson to open a Boston studio, we’ve signed up to try Life in Synergy’s Ballet Booty and Boston Sports Club’s NYC Ballet Workout Movement. We’ll keep you posted…

Lip stains: Growing up, the stylish women in our life all wore Elizabeth Arden Simply Red.  We vividly remember being nine, going to lunch with our mom and grandmother, watching them touch up their lipstick in the powder room, and fervently wishing for the day we would magically morph into an effortlessly chic, red-lipped adult.

That day has not yet arrived.

In the meantime, however, we’re thoroughly enjoying both Stila Pomegranate Crush lip stain and those new Cover Girl lip markers. (We tried, uh, Berry Smooch.) Both varieties provide a long-lasting, pretty color boost without the makeupy-ness of red lipstick, but we like Stila’s lighter, gel-like consistency better. The Cover Girl stains are exactly like Sharpies for your mouth, so they tend to be a bit intense and drying. (We tried applying ours over balm to subdue the color, but discovered that ruins the marker. A better idea is to apply, blot, and add balm after.) Both stains stood up well to our incessant beverage sipping.

Male pageboy haircuts:  On Monday night, we happened to channel-flip through a new episode of NBC’s Medium. Who knew this weird little show was still on the air? And just as improbably…who knew that Patricia Arquette’s TV husband was completely attractive despite his boy-banged haircut? We thought it was just a fluke…until Jay Leno’s first guest, Demetri Martin, came on half an hour later. Same stupid haircut, same cuteness.  Huh.

What else should we obsess over right now?

Though this femme fatale is married, our Bostonista friends fell victim to some up the worst (and most creative) pick-up lines we’ve heard in a long time. It was like an episode of Tool Academy. Please share your stories in the comments at the end of this post!

The Scene: Harpoon St Patrick’s Day Festival
Guy: “Your jaw must hurt…”
Bostonista: “What? Why….”
Guy: “From smiling all day.”
Bostonista: “Ohhh Okay….”

The Scene: The Liberty Hotel. (Bostonista wore an elaborately beaded top, pictured above).
Guy: “Hey. I just noticed your shirt. I am part Native American, and I was wondering what tribe it’s from. It is Iroquois or Cherokee?”
Bostonista: “I don’t know. I just bought it at a store.”
Guy: [Nearly getting down on one knee to examine the beading around the neckline] “I really think it might be Hopi.”
Bostonista: [Laughing] “It’s a really nice display, isn’t it?”
Guy: “Oh come on, I was looking at it from an artistic perspective.”

The Scene: Also at the Liberty Hotel
Guy: “My brother lost the keys to his apartment, so we’re going to have to get a hotel room tonight.”
Bostonista: “That’s too bad. Why don’t you call his landlord to let you in?”
Guy: “Why don’t you girls party with us?”
Bostonista: “I don’t think so. We’re classy ladies. You’d have to pull out a chair for us a few times, before that happens.”
Guy: “I can do that right now.”
Bostonista: “Good bye…”
Guy’s Brother: [Shouting] “Found the keys!”
Guy: “Shhhh, bro…Shhhh”

What’s the worst (or best) pick up line you’ve heard?

There’s many more, of course, like Emerson alum and makeup maven, Bobbi Brown. She’s done-up the dolls of the runway for Oscar de la Renta and Caroline Herrera for years.

And lucky for us, she’s back in town. Brown is launching a new program in makeup artistry this spring at Emerson College, which will kick off with some basic workshops that anyone can sign up for. That means you and me.

The makeup workshops will be instructed by Kimberly Soane, Brown’s manager of artistry. Current course choices are the 10-Step Beauty class, Special Occasion class, and the Mother/Daughter class (just in time for Mother’s Day). Classes are limited to 25 people, cost $200, and are taught on Emerson’s campus at the Brown-supported Tufte Center.

But if you’re looking for something a little more serious (like dropping your 9-5 and making something of your life-long obsession with makeup), then check out Emerson and Bobbi Brown’s professional courses, debuting this summer.

The professional program will cover the fundamentals of makeup artistry, advanced makeup arts, and the business of becoming a professional makeup artist.

Future Bobbi Browns of America need apply.

–ALI NIGRO