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I think I've finally cracked the Da Vinci Code.

No, not the best-selling fiction book. The real Da Vinci Code. Lenny's own personal lifelong bugaboo, the one problem that thwarted his every attempt to grok it like he did so many other brain teasers both profound and not so.

The sad truth is, Leonardo Da Vinci couldn't shave worth a damn.

How do I know this? Because I've studied the man, junior. I've read his journals, probed the margins, watched the Biography Channel special. The guy just couldn't figure it out. It was like he was from Oklahoma or something. The man was designing helicopters half a millennium ago but scraping hair off his puss left him baffled. Bottom line: Lenny was a feeb when it came to sheerage.

"Why can't I get a tushy shave?!" he wrote in in the Codice di Manscapery, right around the time that his beard grew so long and wild that he began to resemble Dusty Hill, noted Texas bassist who wouldn't be born for another five hundred years (even though Dan Brown claims Da Vinci proved, through mathematical equations, that it was Billy Gibbons who actually played bass on every Top track after Rio Grande Mud, and that Dusty was merely a stage prop while sequenced synths held down the bottom, a claim supported by the fact that the single-coil pickup on Dusty's main stage instrument couldn't possibly produce the subharmonic throb heard in the band's live performances, and owing to its lack of a humbucking coil would've hummed like a gospel quartet in the presence of all the elaborate stage lighting which hallmarked the band's shows from its earliest days to the present).

Lenny couldn't cut it, poor bastard. But I can, and have. I have grokked the secret to the perfect shave, and it is this:

Art Shaveau: Shaving as Performance Art.

If you want the perfect shave, you must shave in public. You must uproot your private bathroom ritual, your "Me Time", and take your show on the road.

Yesterday I shaved in public for the first time, in the locker room at the Y where I work out. The shave I got -- nay, was blessed to receive -- was in the top five shaves of my entire life, despite the fact that the cream was unfamiliar, the sink couldn't be filled to rinse my razor and let me shave in blessed and aiding/abetting silence, and I was made bracingly aware, due to the airflow of the Y's formidable air conditioning, that my junk was on semi-display below the bottommost edge of the workout towel I sucked my gut in to wear around my waist.

So today I tried a different tack. If I could achieve such an historic shave with indifferent tools, what if I dialed my rig in a little tighter and really went to town?

Out of my gym bag dop kit came the Trumper's rose shaving cream, rose Skin Food, and Merkur travel brush. In went a tub of the semi-soft Proraso shaving soap, Proraso's liquid cream aftershave balm, and my $12 Omega boar's bristle brush. I kept the Merkur Progress adjustable DE razor, set on "3", and left the still-good Merkur Platinum blade in it.

Hot water running into the unstoppable sink, I commenced to shaving. Today I only had an audience of one -- a 40-something everyguy at the next sink who looked like someone who would, after some deep reflection, name Mike and the Mechanics as his favorite band. While I soaked my brush in the hot water and worked up a lather on the Proraso soap, he rubbed Mennen Speed Stick on his pits and slathered Adidas hair gel into his modified Seacrest.

While I built up a lather with my brush, he looked over quizzically and frowned. Different is always bad. Good, I thought -- tough crowd. Makes you work harder as an artist. I brushed the lather on my face and neck, and ran the Merkur over my face, first with-grain and then, after relathering, against. Mike and the Mechanics guy wasn't frowning anymore -- now he was watching me shave, mentally taking notes, or maybe he was silently singing along to "All I Need Is A Miracle" in his head, I'm not sure which.

I rinsed with cold water and felt that bracing post-Proraso facial freeze deep freeze that keeps this miraculous Italian shaving cream in my regular rotation, and slapped on some of the company's milky post-shave lotion, which felt so good on this hot summer day that I may keep using it till the weather cools down again. Italy gets crazy hot in the summer -- no wonder this combo is so popular over there.

The shave itself was fantastic -- the best I've ever gotten from Proraso. Not a trace of feelable stubble was left anywhere on my face and neck, and the Proraso aftershave lotion left my face so smooth and cool in the summer heat that I'm kicking myself for not breaking this stuff out weeks ago when it really started getting hot here.

As I said yesterday, I don't know if it's the running water masking the sound of the razor's pinging whiskers, or the pressure of public performance, or the post-exercise flush in my cheeks somehow pushing the whiskers out further so they can get chopped closer, but these two shaves I've caught at the Y have been beyond spectacular. I wish I could shave this well at home. Tomorrow's Saturday, my day off my new He-Man regimen, so I'm going to try to do everything in my own bathroom the same as my Y shaves -- running water, Proraso, the Progress razor -- and see if I can match what I'm getting from Art Shaveau. If I can't, then I'll be taking all of my shaves in public from now on.