HATch an egg while you're at it

     I guess everyone who blogs has to make some comment on the Royal Wedding. Well, at least everyone who is gay and knows when a hat is not a hat anymore and has become a habitat. There were more bird nests in Westminster Abbey than at the British Bird Sanctuary. Is there a rule in the etiquette regarding hats that says the wealthier you are, the uglier your hat must be? It looked like half the women there got hit in the head with various flying objects on the way to the wedding and didn't bother brushing them off before arriving. There must be a toxic glue being used by all the milliners in England that is making them insane. Most of the hats could have come from the same annual art show I go to showcasing the very special talents of  children with Down Syndrome.
    Nothing, not even the gorgeous bride herself, was more mesmerizing than the hideousness of the hats. They truly made The Royal Wedding something to behold, and to be bewildered by. Special thanks go out to Prince Andrew for marrying Sarah Ferguson which enabled  her to give birth to their two daughters, Beatrice and Eugenia of York, who each gave birth to one of the two ugliest hats ever to be worn by royalty or anyone else human.

GOD'S ANGRY DREIDELS

    A mile wide tornado! God must be really pissed at Alabama again. Usually His angry dreidels aren't as big or as deadly. Usually they are more for show, to flex some Hebrew muscle, especially around Passover time. It's the modern version of the Seven Plagues of Egypt all spun together like cotton candy into a tight, twirling,  time-saving twister. After all, it  must be the Jewish God because why would the Christian God year after year after year keep on slamming His most devoted followers with these terrifying, murderous tornadoes that pick-off their targets one by one. The focus and intensity makes them seem cruelly intentional.
    It's a terrible thing that no one deserves, but you know darn well that as soon as the quake hits us in San Fran, it's going to be because we were wearing wigs and riding dildos, and Southerners will say we deserved it. Luckily, earthquakes only hit maybe once or twice in a lifetime. These tornadoes keep coming one after another for entire seasons. Obviously God is much angrier at them right now. It's probably got something to do with The Republicans trying to fuck with Medicare. But who knows? As they say, God knows.
    But there's a simple way for people in the Southern states to drastically decrease their chances of being  tornado victims. It's quite scientific. Statistical mathematics and empirical data has shown that gay Jews are the most unlikely group to die from an acute tornado attack. This points to one conclusion, the easy answer to preventing  tornadoes deaths. Since tornadoes hardly ever kill gay Jews, much less even find them, all that has to be done is for people in the South to turn into gay Jews. Maybe then they'll have a little better luck.

Portrait of Dorian Brown - Part 3

    This is the third, and I swear,  final blog about my beard.  I am taking an oath to not write about it again for at least one year. However, I am still free to discuss my beard in person with anyone who is unfortunate enough to get trapped in a conversation about it.

    You probably thought I'd already written everything I could possibly say about beard dyeing. You've read far more than you ever wanted to read about it  and far more than you thought anyone could ever write about it. Alas, there is still one more topic left-- the evolution of the step-by-step shaving and dyeing process I have subjected myself to as well as subjecting everyone I have dragged into it.

   It didn't start off so complicated.  The first time I dyed my beard I did it at home with the help of my friend Michael Eyencohen, the man who initiated me into the special world of "Just For Men" like us.  He sculpted my gray gruff into an actual beard with sharp borders and took special attention to make the bottom of it move with my jaw line. "Nothing is worse than 'high beard'. It's when  a guy shaves his beard-line while he's looking up, and when he looks down the beard ends up being too high. Hence the dreaded 'high beard'.  That's when friends have to step in and say something, or even a concerned stranger."

  Michael is a landscape designer and a conceptual artist, and he treated my beard with the same care and precision he gives to every one of his creations. He squeezed out a dollop of brown cream from one small tube and an equal dollop of neutralizing cream from another small tube and mixed them together into a silky caramel goo that turned into a darker brown as he brushed it on. Instead of using the thin brush that came in the box, he used a spare toothbrush he found in my medicine cabinet because it let him blend the color better. He followed the beard line perfectly and didn't get one speck of dye above or below the borders, and was able to do the entire job in the five minute  allowed by the strict directions. Then had me wash the remaining dye off first with just water then with shampoo.  He turned me to face him so he could gently pat it dry with my towel.

"Well?" I asked. "What do you think?"

"You tell me, hotstuff," he said, turning me back to the mirror.

When I saw how I looked I couldn't help smiling. "There you are, " I pointed at the mirror in amazement. "I finally recognized myself again!" I turned to Michael and gave him a big hug. "It's me again." I couldn't contain how happy it made me and I started to do my own version of The Charleston. "It's me again, it's me again, hello everybody it's me again..." I  danced as Michael proudly grinned at the joy he created in me.

   Then the realization hit me. My Charleston  stopped. "How am I going to do this again without you? Will you do it the next time too?"'

  "Gary, you don't want someone doing this for you. A beard is like a signature. Each one should be a little different. You'll experiment until you know exactly what you want and how to do it. It's easy. Just follow what I did for the first few times then start to vary it, or just keep it exactly like this. I think it looks great right now.  You'll see. It will tell you. I have confidence in you."

     I knew right there I was screwed. There was no way I could duplicate this by myself.  I had tried having a beard a few times over the years but always fucked them up because of my eyesight.  My vision happens to be as bad as my speech, but it just isn't as obvious or widely known as my stutter. Poor vision usually only affects the person whose vision it is; a stutter affects everyone who hears it. People with bad eyesight get along fine with it and even forget how bad their eyes are until they have to see something that only the good-sighted can see.  Even with my super-powered contact lenses my eyes aren't good enough to see the far shadowy corners of my new beard or judge the subtle differences between the left side of the beard and the right. The small mirror of the medicine chest in my bathroom  lit only by a one-bulb frosted glass fixture made seeing anything harder.

    Exactly what was I going to do when I needed my next shave and dye, or even better yet, who was I going to find to do it for me? After only three days my gray hair started  betraying me by growing around the dyed hair and making my beard look scraggly. I needed my next shave, and I needed it fast. I called up Michael to beg him to shave me one more time before setting me free into this new world of independent self-grooming. Being a man of high-minded beliefs and principles, he refused to help me in an effort to get me to challenge myself. I, being a man of wavering principles and desperation, immediately called every other friend  I could think of  who would be willing to shave me. I was able to convince the ones who didn't hang up on me. That got me through the first two months but I soon ran out of friends who didn't think it was totally ridiculous. I had to expand my search and find other men.  I couldn't go to my body hair trimmer Anthony because  I would have needed to see him 9 times a month which at a price of $20 minimum charge per appointment would have cost  $180 a month. For that price, I could hire a hooker dressed in a latex jock and thigh-high leather boots and have him shave my beard, which is a great fantasy but I would still need to be shaved eight other times a month. Craigslist, on the other hand,  is free and there are always guys offering to shave other guys. The only problem with that is they would want to do the unthinkable---shave the rest of my body hair too. The only other option I could think of was to just ask a neighbor. It was free too, and more convenient and safer.
     I did what seemed to be the most logical way of finding a willing neighbor.  I  sat on the bench in the lobby of my building shirtless holding a razor and shaving cream, waiting to see who came through the front door. I was going to decide who to ask  according to their level of creepiness and if they had a beard themselves. If it was someone creepy but who had a great beard, I was prepared to ignore the creepiness if I had to. What I didn't realize was how creepy I looked as I sat there shirtless holding a razor and shaving cream. Some people were giving me strange looks and others were totally ignoring me. A few gay men were looking at me strangely, and even one or two creepy gay guys had the nerve to give me strange looks too.
      A little while later Karl  the Building Manager came out of the elevator and walked towards me and asked if everything was alright. " Are you  locked out of your apartment?'
      " No. Everything's fine,' I smiled.
       " I got calls from 2 tenants complaining about some guy, you know, not being dressed. She must have said 'half-naked' but all I heard was naked. And I'm thinking 'Oh great, there's some crazy naked man in the lobby.' Glads it's just you."
        " I'm just waiting to find someone to shave me," I said as if it made sense.
         He looked at me with an even stranger face then everyone who passed me before. Only then did I realize how I must have looked, and worse, sounded.       " I'm so sorry Karl. Please just forget this. "I stood up and said, then turned and ran up the stairs into my apartment. " What was I thinking? I must have looked insane,"  I spoke out loud to myself, shaking my head and rolling my eyes. I walked into the bathroom and pointed in the mirror. " That's it. Either you're shaving yourself or the beard is coming off."
  I had spent my whole life accepting the limitations of my eyesight with the understanding  that I simply couldn't do certain things, things that were best done for me. A perfect example of this is driving a car. I knew as a teenager that I should never drive, that it would exponentially increase my chances of dying as well as the chances of people dying around me. I was satisfied to be Miss Daisy and be driven around by everyone. Nobody even knew until very recently that I had actually passed Driver's Ed when I was 16, and was given a license that I burned in a private ceremony with myself to celebrate the longer life I would be having. I now realize I owe all those people who drove me thousands upon thousands of miles a special thanks, as well as a promise:  I , Gary Glassman,  will henceforth never make anyone shave my beard again, and that I,  Gary Glassman, heretofore will shave my own beard no matter how difficult it is.
   I stood in the bathroom figuring out what I would need then went to Cliff's Hardware. For the wall to the left of my sink I bought a big, round wall-mounted mirror with a long double-jointed movable arm that flipped over into a magnifying mirror, and for the other side of the sink another mirror  2'x2' with hooks that could hang on the shower rod. I also bought enough clip-on spotlights for a Hollywood premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theater.
    I hung the mirrors and then positioned the spotlights all around the sink from above and below and hanging from a towel hook on the door behind me. Then I adjusted  the arm of the mirror as I tipped the angle of it and tried every possible angle to see if I could get a good view of  each section of my beard.  Just to make sure I did a dry run with the blade removed from my razor and went through every position of the mirror and the spotlights that I would need.  The bathroom was as bright as a lighthouse, and the heat from the spotlights was actually making me sweat. I could see perfectly though, which was all that mattered. I just had to be careful not to bump into any of them and set myself or the towels on fire. Ready to start, I organized all the supplies I needed for the shaving and the dyeing on the toilet lid.

    First, I used my electric clippers to buzz off the rim of hair that spitefully remained on my scalp and continued down to the sides of my beard which, according to an extremely gay friend who teaches at Vidal Sassoon, should end at the same point that the arms of eyeglasses go over the ear. Using  a number 3 guard, I trimmed my beard and was left with new gray hairs on my face and the remnants of the brown dyed hair in the sink. Then I was ready for the big test.      I put the shaving cream on my face and tried to keep the borders of my beard as visible as possible. I stuck the razor under hot water then lifted it to my face,  squinting my eyes as I started to follow the beard-line using all three mirrors. I was so focused on not fucking up that I kept on forgetting to breathe. Cocking  my head at every angle humanly possible, I tried to get the best view of different parts of my beard as I turned my body a little bit clockwise then counterclockwise to see which of the mirrors was catching each reflection. I was moving so cautiously and so slowly that the hair was going to grow back if I didn't finished soon. I re-examined the beard from every angle and wiped off the remaining shaving cream. I was bleeding on my neck in two places but I didn't care. The only thing I cared about was the beard, and besides being gray,it, actually looked good! I was so proud of myself. A personal triumph. Like an amputee crossing the Finish Line. Like a fat man losing enough weight to fit in an airplane seat. Like a retarded person flying a kite. Moments in life to remember.
    With the shaving done, only the dyeing part was left, and I had already figured out how to do it  myself. Not that the dyeing process was ever easy, especially  at the start. At the beginning it was a disaster. My beard has to be dyed every two weeks, and for the first two months I either mixed the formula wrong and made the color too dark, or brushed it on too quickly and got it on my face, burning my skin and turning it shades of red.  Sometimes, I wound up with a dark brown beard with the skin around it bright as red lipstick, making me look like a cross between a clown and a burn victim. I kept trying to perfect the process, and bought a chapstick made of bee's wax to outline my beard and keep the dye from getting onto my skin. Now I only hideously burn my face once every few months. I also got the brilliant idea of splitting my beard in two, doing one half at a time, each for five minutes, so I didn't have to rush to do the whole thing at once. To make sure both sides come out equal I  squeeze out the same amounts of dye in two different little plastic trays and compare the two. With all the added lighting, I was able to see the gray better and keep the dye brush on the borders without going onto the skin as much. After I dyed both sides and washed it off with shampoo in the shower, I used soap and a wash cloth to clean off the bee's wax and any dye that did get on my skin. I did the final check in the mirrors to see if the color and the shape looked even. For the first time, I did the entire process all on my own. I was follicularly liberated.
  After a half year of practice, I've gotten so good at shaving and dyeing that I don't need the Broadway lighting and magnifying mirror anymore.  I can do it practically anywhere that has a sliver of  mirror, a light bulb, and  running water. In my gym bag I always carry my electric buzzer with three different length guards, spare batteries, a razor and extra blades, shaving cream  and aftershave lotion, a box of "Just For Men" Medium Brown, a vile of shampoo, bee's wax chapstick and 2 brown washclothes, all part of my version of an earthquake preparedness kit, minus anything you would actually need for an earthquake, except the batteries.  Also always in my bag is one tightly folded and sealed plastic dropcloth that opens to 10 feet x 10 feet. I can cover an entire bathroom with it and leave no trace of my ever being there after I'm done. Like Dexter cleaning up after a murder.
      I might have to hide the names and locations of some of the places I've dyed my beard in but I never hide the fact that I dye my beard.  I don't know how hiding it is even possible. A beard grows in so quickly someone would have to re-dye it every other day. Now that's a level of vanity and of desperation I can't even fathom. Letting it go from brown to salt 'n pepper to pure salt and then re-dyeing it brown again is my way of saying I care, but I don't care too much.