Mustasche March

This March, I participated in a competition to see who could grow the best mustache. The thing was dreamed up in February by Adam and Slate, who by their own admission saw it mainly as an excuse to have more guys walking around Penland with creepy mustaches. The rules were simple: the mustache had to be grown of the participant's own hair, on the participant's own face, and each contestant had to start the month with a clean shave and agree to pay the winner a dollar. Voting took place at lunch in the Pines, on Monday the 30th, and the winner was announced at lunch the next day. I am pleased to announce that my mustache took home the cash prize and a trophy, which was beautifully crafted by Glass instructor Martin Janecky and gilded by studio assistant Carrie Battista. I believe that the reasons for my victory were twofold: 1. fast-growing facial hair, and 2. the courage to grow and wear it as a mustache for the entire month, rather than growing a beard and shaving the excess near the end as many of my competitors did. Cheered by the crowd to make an acceptance speech, I offered these words: "I'd like to thank my parents for giving me the genetic material that made this victory possible, and the good people in the kitchen who fed me such a delicious, high-protein diet. Also, thanks to Adam and Slate for having the vision and making it a reality, and to all of you good people for your encouragement and your votes. I hope that my victory today may go some distance toward rehabilitating the popular image of the mustache. It seems that somewhere along the line, the mustache fell out of favor in our culture. Maybe this is because (as my fellow core student Mark Warren suggested) many of us grew up with an unconscious fear that Burt Reynolds would steal our mothers from us (though in my case, it was Tom Selleck); or perhaps we watched one too many cheap pornos in college or saw Charlie's Angels kidnapped by one too many mustached men in a conversion van. Whatever the reason, I think it's a mistake, and I am here today to declare that I am not a child molester, nor a 70s porn star, nor your 6th grade gym teacher. I am a good man, a gentle man, a friendly man, a man with a mustache."
It was a proud moment for me. But one shouldn't rest on laurels, and it seemed that a March mustache might be bad luck in April, so that evening before bed I snipped, clipped, and shaved my upper lip back to the factory preset, as it were.