Catastrophic Beard Failure
The girls and I are performing in Fiddler on the Roof at the Scera Shell Outdoor Theatre this summer. I’m playing the Rabbi and the girls are playing my daughters…or maybe granddaughters, depending on how old Jerry Elison, the director, wants me to play the part.
At Jerry’s request, I’ve been growing a beard since early April. Summer in Utah is not the best time to be sporting facial hair, but I’m all for authenticity (says the guy who’s playing the perhaps-80-year-old Rabbi), so I don’t mind. Besides, I had a beard last summer for Crazy for You and the summer before that for Oklahoma.
I hadn’t trimmed the beard for a few weeks, so I got up early this morning to clean it up a bit before I had to wake up the girls and get to rehearsal. It was early enough that I was still a little bleary-eyed, but I was doing pretty well and I’d just managed to give the bottom of my moustache a crisp, bold, definitive edge with the electric trimmers when my hand slipped and I took a good 3”x3” chunk of beard on my chin right down stubble.
I stood there, staring at the gaping beard wound in the mirror for a few seconds, and then I went on trimming the rest of my beard as if nothing had happened. I must have been in beard shock, because I honestly thought for a moment that if I didn’t acknowledge the hole, it would just go away. Perhaps my beard auto-immune system would kick in and miraculously repair the damage. Or maybe no one would notice my lily-white chin shining out from the center of my jet-black beard.
But, like any man with a really obvious bald spot, I could only fool myself for so long…at which point I started thinking of ways to disguise it. I considered trying to hide the gap by continuously stroking my chin as if I was lost in perpetual thought about some very weighty issues. Then I considered that infomercial hair spray paint, but even with expedited shipping there was little chance of it arriving before rehearsal at 9:00am.
So I started “blending,” cutting the surrounding edges shorter to ease the transition…which succeeded in turning the original 3-inch patch into a 5-inch field. Then I decided the best thing to do was to trim the whole beard down to the same length…which didn’t work out quite as well as I thought it would. And by the time the girls woke up, I had a face that was so soft and smooth it would have put every baby’s bottom in a ten mile radius to shame.
So I’m back to square one…or hair one, as the case may be…
Comments
Kate
This is why I’ve never, ever attempted to cut my own hair or anyone else’s. Let’s just say it would end up, um - askew. Perhaps like the time I went, as a teenager, to the guy at Weinstocks (my age is showing) who dressed all in leather (but he always left his top COMPLETELY OPEN) and told him, and I quote, “I want something different.” Aw, the folly of youth. My hair was cropped up to my ear on one side and almost to my shoulder on the other. People didn’t look at me with their heads un-cocked until I grew it out and cut it all ONE length. And people WONDER why I never touched my eyebrows (but to comb them) until I was thirty-five.
As for that spray hair stuff - it’s come a long way. Now it has actual FIBERS in it (or so they claim). It was, at one point, literally spray paint that wouldn’t poison our head (at least I PRESUME it didn’t poison your head). Why do I know this? Because Bronson Pinchot (lovable Balki Bartokomous from “Perfect Strangers”) once used it on camera on the “David Letterman Show.” God bless him.
bennion
look to whiskerino for inspiration my friend. think ‘grow’.
grettir
Man, that’s quite a rogue’s gallery. WhiskerWino is more like it.
With all due respect to my hirsute brethren, there’s a difference between burly and burlesque…
bennion
hehe… agreed. so when are you going to flickr some pics of the regrowth process?
grettir
Dave, the last thing the world needs is pictures of my ugly mug…especially during the re-growth process.
jenny
Besides, it only takes about 72 hours for him to go from baby’s-bum smooth to full Grizzly Adams anyway…
mary
I was upstairs sewing last night, just before 10:30, when the distant, plaintive strains of a familiar melody came wafting ever so faintly through the open window.
“A-na-TEV-ka, A-na-TEV-ka … ,” like a visit from an old friend.
Instantly, I was transported back to cool, dark summer nights on the Sundance stage, with its backdrop of towering black pine silhouettes, under a canopy of bright stars. Ahhhhh.
Then I thought, “Holy Cow! That’s coming all the way from the
Scera Shell Outdoor Theatre! That’s got to be in violation of some noise ordinance.”
.58 miles as the crow flies, if you were wondering.