The Beard's Comeback

I almost didn’t graduate from high school. Actually, I almost wasn’t allowed to go through my high school graduation. As was custom, seniors got out of school a week early, before graduation, at Wichita High School Southeast, and in anticipation, I stopped shaving a week before that. This was in 1967, the year the Beatles began showing up on their album covers with facial hair. Of course, not shaving for several days or even a week when I was 18 wouldn’t have produced any observable results. But not shaving for two weeks did yield a faint shadow of facial hair along my jaw. As I stood in line on the concourse of the field house for graduation, some faculty or administrator spotted my growth, sounded the alarm (facial growth was strictly forbidden at our school, for males or females), and an incident ensured. First there was talk of finding a razor to shave me, but no one had thought to bring shaving equipment to a graduation. (I bet they did the next year.) The next possibility was to deny me entrance to the ceremony, call for my parents (who were up in the audience), and have them take me home. I can’t recall the specifics, but after much deliberation over a situation that had never happened before, cooler heads must have prevailed, and I was finally allowed to resume my place in the procession of happy (for all kinds of reasons) graduates.

I recall this because apparently the beard is having something of a comeback. Chuck Norris has had a beard for some time. Zach Galifianakis sports a beard in some of his movies. Even the hunks George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matthew McConaughey, and Leonardo DiCaprio have been seen with facial hair (tasteful, to be sure) of late. Prince William occasionally has a beard. And just last night I saw that Steve Carell now also has one. 

(This is not me.)

I’ve had a beard most of my adult life. I’ve had a mustache all of the 45 years since those two weeks before my high school graduation. For 40 years, I’ve only been beardless twice, briefly: In 1975, as a graduate student in theater, I played a soldier in a Jules Feifer play who ran out and was shot in the first 10 seconds of the play and remained lying dead on the stage for the first three-minute scene, so for the sake of verisimilitude, shaved my beard (though not my mustache) before the show opened. I was already growing it back during the run of the show. In 1981, I went for a year to teach for the military in Germany, and thought it probably best to shave my beard (though not my mustache) to better fit in with my students on post. But after only a couple of weeks of fitting in with my students, I realized that I’d rather fit in with the Germans around town and so grew out first a goatee and then later a full beard. And I’ve had that beard for all of the past 31 years.

Styles come and go, and beards are no different. Whenever they’ve come back into fashion I feel something of the cutting edge. But then inevitably they fade from fashion again a few years later and I hang on as a hairy relic. My beard (and hair) now are gray and that in itself confers a certain status, either the learned professor, or the wise sage of years – or just an old coot. It doesn’t matter anymore. Comebacks are not something we of a certain age give much attention to. We're happy to be able to grow anything. It's a daily reminder that we're still alive.