No. Not the person who acts as a front for the real talent, as in “Who’s the beard?”
I’m talking about the growth on my face. It’s been seven years and a lot of heartache since I last had hair on my face in a meaningful way. Seven years ago I “played” keyboards in a punk/jazz band called Swimpigs (I’m on the left,with minor growth… the photo was taken after I decided to lose The Beard). We tried hard to clear rooms, but never did, despite my hair/beard combo. The sax guy redeemed us. Dude could blow.
The major difference now, aside from the no-longer-rockstar status, this time the wife wants the beard.
I began to refer to the beard as The Beard when my very conservative brother-in-law-to-be told me when I first started the project that “The Beard is a Symbol. A Symbol of REBELLION.”
He had a kind of GOP terrordome twinge to his assertion. He would have done more harm if he’d have said my beard didn’t look totally rocker and made me look like that guy from the Star Trek series who slept with everybody in space (no, not Shatner, the guy from Star Trek: the Next Generation, pictured above). Frankly, it was pretty cliched to be a rocker with bad facial hair. Knowing this at the time, I couldn’t quite understand where he was coming from on the whole rebellion tip. Until I heard Newt Gingrich start talking about the Cultural Elite and the damage done by the counter culture in the 60s. It all locked in like a giant diorama of dissent rendered in stunning 3D by an army of ILM animators:
- The Beard influenced everybody from Castro to Timothy Leary. Did Oliver North have a beard? Exactly. The Beard is responsible for urban blight, teen pregnancy, crack cocaine, crack babies and butt crack.
So yeah. I’m growing a beard again.