It's the End of the Beard as We Know It, and I Feel Fine

There really is something about facial hair. Since I got home on Tuesday, I took Tanner (8) to see the latest Narnia movie as a reward for having read the book. I noticed that, among the Telmarines and Sons of Adam, all of the bad guys had facial hair, and all of the good guys were clean shaven (dwarves, minotaurs, and centaurs, of course, are another story).

That got me to thinking about the ebbs and flows of facial hair in history. The earliest depictions of Jesus on the Italian peninsula showed him cleanly shaven. As time progressed, he's been shown much more often to have a beard.

As I've written before, facial hair was nearly ubiquitous on men in 1908. Thus, Mark, Doug, and I grew some funky beards so that we could channel our fictitious great-grandfathers.

Well, last Monday night, after our closing show in Indianapolis, Doug and I were shorn (Mark kept his beard long enough to get back to San Francisco so that his family could see it). And, of course, we filmed it: