Hello,
I realize that I haven’t been updating regarding the National Post columns, but lately, they haven’t been very telling about future episodes. But today I’m pretty excited because Sunday’s episode is already up on the Archive! In case you’re not already subscribing to it, you should. Here’s the blurb from cbc.ca:
“How To Say Goodbye”
This week on WireTap, a man confronts the minister who ruined his grandmother’s funeral. Plus, Howard outsources his friendship with Jonathan to an Indian call center.
Anyway, the National Post article today is notable for its continued discussion on beards:
After seeing a photograph of myself at the office Christmas party looking 15 years older and 65% more gnome-like, I finally decide to throw in the towel and shave my beard.
While shaving, I stop at the moustache and stare at myself in the mirror. Mustachioedness. I look like a completely different style of person. I look like the kind of guy who’d sing Motown songs in the public showers at the Y– someone who’d shirtlessly open his front door to the gas man and say, “Come on in, chief.”
What would my life become if I stopped right now, in mid-shave, and walked off into the world bemoustached? Is this how you become a certain kind of person? You start off just wanting to check something out for a moment, but then you keep stretching that odd, mustachioed moment out longer and longer until one day, you look in the mirror and it isn’t so odd any more — it’s simply a part of your life. Maybe that’s all a life is — an accumulation of things that are initially weird that, through time, become less so. A moustache. A facial piercing. A chair at work three inches from the ground. You bundle all of these weird things together to form this even weirder thing: who you are.
I shave off the moustache feeling relieved about who I am not — which is my version of feeling good about who I am.
For those of you unfamiliar with how important beards are to the heart of Wiretap, please see/hear:
- Gentleman’s Guide to Grooming (with Gregor and John Hodgman)
- This excerpt from a March 12, 2008 National Post article:
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I’ve recently taken to wearing a beard some weeks and not others. When I first grew it, acquaintances I’d run into would say encouraging things like, “CaptainCaveman!” or “Wolfman Goldstein!” But now that I have shaved it and regrown it several times, people feel less invested in its existence and have stopped responding. All along, my goal has been to yo-yo back and forth between beardedness and non-beardedness so often that, eventually, no one would pay any notice to what I looked like. Bald. Fat. Bearded–none of it would linger in the onlooker’s mind’s eye, and eventually I would become visually fluid in the public’s memory. Like the Incredible Shmoo, if you will.
To this end, I wake up this morning and shave my two weeks’ growth. Afterwards, Zouzou says I look younger, but when I see Gregor in the evening, he tells me I look older.
“Your beard was patchy and youthful,” he says. “It made you look like a 14-year-old, mid-century rabbi. Plus, it covered up your wrinkles. Though I guess not the ones around your eyes, ears and forehead.”
According to a copy of Film World from 1915, the secret to Fatty Arbuckle’s success — what set him apart from other morbidly obese vaudevillians who could balance on telephone wires — was that he was possessed of an ability to laugh at himself. This is another in a long, growing list of reasons why I am nothing like Fatty Arbuckle: I cannot laugh at myself. Nonetheless, as Gregor jokes, I try to laugh, and my face takes on the expression of someone trying to swallow a fistful of metal shavings.
The way that people can learn so much personal information from looking at a face strikes me as unfair. Even a beard is not enough to cover up the truth of our inner selves. Maybe in the future, humans will wear hats that come down to the chin, with holes for the eyes –like the kid from the Fat Albert gang used to wear. Then no one will ever be able to see what we look like. Then, no one will ever know when we are mouthing the words, “stupid, lousy Gregor” through gritted teeth.
- The episode “Time to Face the World.” (feat. Tony Asimakopoulous and Howard Chackowicz)
Okay, that’s all the beard-lore I have time to dig up for today. Bye!
