I have finally figured out why I have been taken advantage of all these years.
Especially at home. It's my chin. My chin definitely lacks authority.
Not that I would want one of those Jay Leno jobs, or anything like that. I'm talking about chin enough to allow me at least to hold my own when it comes to human relationships. Especially at home.
I know what you're thinking--and forget it. You're thinking: Hide your milquetoast physiognomy behind a heard, Stupid! Well, let me ask you this: Have you ever looked a beard squarely in the face? I didn't think so.
Well, I have. How often I have stood before the bathroom mirror of late stroking my five o'clock shadow (Eastern Standard Time) and contemplated letting my shadow develop into an authoritative display of foliage. But you know me. Except for my marriage, I have never jumped rashly into a lifestyle switcheroo of this magnitude.
The first question, of course, is would my dear wife, Lois, be tickled with a bearded hubby? A poll revealed that if she had her druthers, she'd druther embrace a camel's hair pillow than a face full of whiskers. Thinking she might be alone in her crude comparison, I took time off to dig into the subject.
I now take you to this newspaper account of the celebrated Billings divorce case:
"Abner Billings appeared in divorce court today, charging his wife, Gertrude, keeps attacking his beard with a spray gun.
"`It's a regular blitzkrieg,' he said. `She thinks beards are unsanitary and should be sprayed with disinfectant. I could stand it if she were a better shot, but she keeps squirting the stuff in my eyes.
' "Judge Hackerby suggested settling the quarrel by mowing the hay, but Mr. Billings was adamant. `It took me eight months to grow this beard,' he said. `If I have to choose between my beard and my wife, I'll take the beard.'"
If you remember your fifth-grade history, it was Alexander the Great who first shot down the beard, ordering his soldiers to knock off with the facial forest to prevent the enemy from using it as a handhold during infighting engagements. If the wives of the baldfaced returning heroes awarded Alex a bronzed olive branch for his decree, we know not. But when it came to infighting we do know that the shaving of the beard of Louis VII of France actually brought about a war with England that lasted 300 years. Behind it was a woman, of course.
Seems that Louis had got himself hitched to Eleanor of Aquitaine who, going against the flow, objected to a beardless husband. After getting a divorce, she became the wife of Henry II of England. Henry, you may remember, had a beard he could tuck into his belt on windy days. With this authority and her dowry, clean-shaven Louis didn't stand a chance.
Alas, Eleanor of Aquitaine proved to be one of a kind. Beards have been causing domestic wars ever since wives discovered that whiskers could be mowed, shaven, or set on fire. The fashion of a beardless face swung so far, in fact, that as early as the reign of Henry I, Serle, the bishop, would compare bearded men of the Norman English Court with "filthy goats and bristly Saracens." Peter the Great did his bit by levying a tax on all Russian beards (a sirtax, you might say. I certainly wouldn't say it, but you might).
So widely had spread the accursed fad of shaving that Shakespeare, in Much Ado About Nothing, had Beatrice get off a couple of lines that could very well have influenced women to this day. "I could not endure a husband with a beard on his face," is what she got off. "I would rather lie in the woolen." Long johns of 100 percent wool, as I interpret it.
There are among the female side of our species a certain number who, either from desperation or nearsightedness, will actually pursue a man flaunting a beard. But by and large women (as well as small women) do not understand a man's mission in letting his whiskers grow rampant. …
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