Bachelor Girls

In plays such as "Isn't It Romantic, Uncommon Women and Others, " and the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Heidi Chronicles, " Wendy Wasserstein put her finger on the pulse of her post-modern, post-feminist sisters and delivered her diagnosis with shrewd good humor and an unerring sense of the absurd. That same engaging sensibility bubbles through the twenty-nine essays in "Bachelor Girls, " in which Wasserstein presents her observations on: Boyfriends-- "The worse the boyfriend, the more stunning your American Express bill.: Role Models-- "In the forties emulating an ideal woman meant bobbing your hair like Betty Grable's. In the eighties, because of Jessica Lange, women have to get a Pulitzer Prize-winning actor-playwright to fall in love with them, have a child by on of the world's great dancers, be nominated for two Academy Awards, and enjoy doing the laundry on a farm."Success-- "I knew my friend Patti was a big-time Hollywood agent the first time I saw her dial a telephone with a pencil."

Ranging from the dietary secrets of lemon mousse to the politics of the second marriage, with stopovers at a bar mitzvah in Westchester, a chess tournament in Rumania, and a Tokyo production of "Isn't It Romantic, Bachelor Girls" is pure Wasserstein, which is to say, pure joy.