On wearing a moustache

I choose to write this evening about an experience I had about 6 months ago. I am somewhat concerned that it may violate the official "What Happens in Vegas..." policy. And, that slogan is vaguely threatening. But I feel compelled to write a bit about a piece of performance art/sociological experiment/exercise in jackassery I participated in, tourism slogans be damned.

For a Las Vegas trip, I grew a moustache. Not as part of a beard, or a van dyke, or anything. Just an honest-to-god, Tom Selleck moustache.

I figured, why should they be the exclusive province of sexual deviants? Time ago was, real men could grow moustaches. Now, it is Mike Ditka, Jeff Fisher, and the singer from the Killers. And that's about it.

I had two comrades-in-'stache enlisted with me. We all grew moustaches. Great, aggressive, manly moustaches.

The first thing we noticed: moustaches make you self-counscious. This was demonstrated in part by the fact that my two comrades-in-'stache abandoned me day one. Shaved 'em off, right off the bat. They didn't feel comfortable, they said. And I can't say I blamed them. Although drunker than they, I, too was self-conscious.

Which is somewhat interesting. I have had varying degrees of facial hair many times in the past. I have wilfully chosen to dress in a silly manner in public, with no problem. But wearing the moustache, I was constantly aware that I looked strange, in a way that I did not feel when I wore a cowboy hat (somewhat) unironically. And everytime I forgot, I strolled past a reflective surface, and the process began again.

In a related observation, the moustache is often all that people notice of you. I was told many, many times that I looked like Wade Boggs. And it was never qualified, "with your moustache." Just- "Hey, has anyone ever told you that you look like Wade Boggs?" One poker dealer even deemed a streak of bad luck for me "The Boston Massacre."

Wade Boggs is a 50 year old man. I am 27. Wade Boggs is bald- he even advertises for a hair restoration service. I have a ridiculously full head of hair, to the point that it grows out, not up. Wade Boggs is taller and (at least somewhat, in his post-playing days) heavier than me. Facially, I in no way resemble the chicken-eating "Cheers" guest star who manned third base for the Red Sox. But people still insisted that I looked exactly like the guy, because of the one (and only) trait we shared- a reddish moustache.

That kind of reductive comparison really called my attention to the degree that people recognize moustaches.

Another observation was that you do not blend in to your surroundings nearly as well when you are wearing a moustache. When I sat down at a poker table, everyone looked up at me, and took an extra second or three to size me up. I am used to looking very anonymous. But in a moustache, I just didn't blend.

I think it is endlessly fascinating that this particular facial hair style has fallen so far from grace that it looks out of the ordinary today. Pull some baseball cards from the 1970s- half the players in the major leagues had moustaches. It was normal, accepted. And somewhere along the line, the moustache became uncool. Very uncool.

Even Wayne Newton shaved his moustache.

Maybe it was Freddie Mercury, or Super Mario, or Wade Boggs himself. Maybe it was social tides beyond the control or comprehension of the average man. But somewhere, in between 1990 and 1995, the moustache fell out of favor. And now, as I learned in the Nevada gambling mecca, a man must be brave, and drunker than I, to wear a moustache with pride.

I do believe that one day average Joes will reclaim this look from Johnny Molester and the rest of his deviant ilk. But for now, the moustache wearer is a lonely man.