I’m growing a moustache..or at least attempting to.
Now, wait..before you all race to make comments like, good grief Lund don’t you know they went out in the 80’s? Only porn stars and cops wear moustaches anymore…..hear me out.
I’ve never been able to grow facial hair worth a darn. A few patches here and there but even into my fifties I could still go a day or two without shaving and nobody would notice.
It always bothered me knowing that had I been born a few centuries earlier, my Viking ancestors who equated a full beard as a mark of manhood, would have left me and my naked face behind with the village women learning rosemaling, hardanger and hut decorating while they sailed off in their long boats to do some manly pillaging.
I missed out on the glory days of sideburns and moustaches in the 70’s.
Oh, yeah..the Ron Burgandy look. Alas, I could not grow a beauty like this for real..but you can see how great it would have looked.By the time I’d get a little soup strainer going to the point where it was visible, my two week vacation would be over..
I couldn’t go on the air with a little growth of peach fuzz on my upper lip..so off it all went.
One year, I took THREE weeks off and really had a nice lip hedge started only to be daydreaming in the shower on day 20 and without thinking, dragged the razor right through one side of it.
“Oh fudge,” I yelled as soapy water and tears washed tiny little hairs down the drain…only I didn’t say fudge.
I kind of wanted to be like my old pal, George Calcagno, a dashing Italian, for whom shaving was like painting the Golden Gate Bridge. By the time he finished both sides of his face, it was time to start all over from the beginning. He tried to tell me I was the lucky one and shaving was such a drudgery but I was still jealous.
Silly and juvenile, I know, but here’s how some of us would have looked if we grew facial hair to fit personalities.I’ve wanted a moustache long before I got into TV. Way back in 1970, I decided if I couldn’t grow one..I’d BUY one.
It took a few weeks to arrive at my barber’s shop where we used ample amounts of spirit gum to attach the thing to my upper lip.
I only wore it once..playing drums on a dance job with a country music band. It must not have looked very real because people kept coming up to me pointing, laughing and saying stuff like,“How ya doin’, there Tex?”
They were right, it didn’t look very legit; silly, really.
“Yeah, but you can grow hair on top of your head like a silverback gorilla” my prematurely follicley-challenged friend, Vernon Brown..who started losing his hair in the 2nd grade, used to tell me.
I know..but I still want a little cookie duster of my very own and now, as I get older, my body seems to be saying “Okay Doug, it’s HAIR time!” A follicle free-for-all is taking place. Not only are whiskers showing up on my face like never before but in my nose and ears too.
I would have Andy Rooney eyebrows if my barber didn’t mow the rogue hairs down once a month.
So, we’ll see how long I can endure the humiliation and criticism of friends and family who think my moustache (I’m going for the Clark Gable look) is just stupid. I’ll bet they’re planning an intervention over Christmas to get me shaving again. But they don’t seem to understand that, like another famous and determined mustachioed man once said, “I have a dream.”