Mustaches for Kids

We’re now slightly over a week into our 2011 mustache campaign, and I have come to the realization that I am just not a hairy man. Eleven months out of the year I suppose I would view this as a positive. But this is mustache season, and hair on the upper lip is a hot commodity. Once again, I find myself sporting a mustache similar to the ones that some of my follicly-advanced classmates proudly wore in seventh grade.

A huge part of Mustaches For Kids — our local chapter of the national organization that is raising money for Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Pediatric Cancer Care Center — is our weekly get together, or checkpoints. We use these meetings to raise funds, spread word of our efforts, support one another in time of growth and, of course, compare mustaches. We met last Friday afternoon at the Beach House and the turnout was great. Participants, or “growers” as we call them, wore our gray “Growstrong” T-shirts and blue “Ask Me About My Mustache” pins. Awesome — until most participants started asking me the same question…. “Where’s your mustache?” Each time I would do my best to stretch my lip and show off what I had worked so hard to grow. For those of you who have never experienced it yourself, trying to prove to another man that there is in fact hair on your upper lip can be somewhat awkward. I finally resulted to greeting my charitably hairy friends with a simple, “Trust me, it is there … just give it some time.”

Still, it was clear that there was a brotherhood developing right before my eyes, among many people who had never met before but have come together for a great cause. Formal introductions were no longer needed. For us, a hairy upper lip, regardless of its prominence, is a sign of a good person, a sign of committed person, a sign of a friend.