A farewell to Mustache March

General Robin Olds and his bulletproof mustache

So this whole month I’ve been  unenthusiastically swept up into “Mustache March,” due to my boyfriend’s lab’s participation. According to Air Force legend:

Mustache March originated during the Vietnam War when a fighter pilot named Robin Olds grew what he called a “bulletproof mustache.” At the time mustaches weren’t allowed to be sported in the military, but Olds, who was far from home on a military base in ‘Nam, thought the stache defined his individuality, so he kept it. This occurred in the month of March 1965.

Once Olds returned home in April, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. John P. McConnell, who wasn’t fond of Olds’s defiance, greeted him. McConnell walked up to him, stuck a finger under his nose and ordered, “Take it off.” Olds replied, “Yes, sir.”

Thus the roots of Mustache March were born. Air Force pilots now devote one month of defiance of the Air Force facial hair regulations as a way of good-natured protest, and pay to tribute to General Robin Olds.

The male scientists’ plan was a competition to grow the biggest and best facial hair in one month, but after a while most of their girlfriends and wives said “Ha ha ha that was funny but now it is time to get rid of that monstrosity.” The head of the lab got rid of his because his young daughters would no longer kiss him goodnight.

My boyfriend has been the only one in his lab still mustached for a couple weeks or so now and so is kind of automatically the winner at this point, but he has decided to hold out for the entire month for pride’s sake.

But today is the final day! I held out! I didn’t complain that much! I only started laughing at inappropriately intimate moments like three or four times! And tomorrow is my reward: the mustache comes off.

And now a celebration of the fact that it will be at least another year, if not more, before I am asked if I want a mustache ride: the top ten mustaches I am totally OK with. What mustaches do you view as acceptable?

10 & 9: These two can get away with it.

8. Ramathorn. Holy crap, there’s a Super Troopers 2 in production?

7. You know Frida Kahlo was hot.

6. Mustache TV: a really dumb party game in which you stick a mustache on your TV screen and wait for it to line up perfectly with someone’s face. The Sound of Young America interview with the creator, Andy Daly, is extremely charming.

5 & 4. Frank Zappa and Mark Twain:  different centuries, different facial hair. Both geniuses, both people I’d definitely have sex with (if I didn’t have a boyfriend and they weren’t both dead), both doing Tyra Banks’ “fierce eyes” in these pictures way before their time.

3. Ambrose Burnside: sort of the O.G. of the facial hair world.

2. Salvador Dali: it’s not like it detracted from the crazy eyes; it really worked with them.

1. Groucho Marx. You may note that his mustache isn’t real in this picture; he used greasepaint to make his eyebrows and mustache for a good deal of his career. Here’s a neat explanation from his son Arthur Marx in a really interesting interview with Cigar Aficionado:

When he became a success in vaudeville and on Broadway’s legitimate stage, he didn’t have the time after dinner to enjoy a leisurely smoke. In order to make the curtain he usually had to gulp down his meal and rush right over to the theater and start putting on his makeup. When he first made it in big-time vaudeville, he wore an ersatz mustache that had to be glued on under his nose very carefully before every performance. This took time.

Once, however, Groucho lingered over his dinner coffee in the restaurant across the street from the theater too long. As a result he was too late getting to the theater to glue on the phony mustache. Instead, he grabbed a stick of black greasepaint from the dressing table and painted on a black mustache under his nose and heavy eyebrows over his eyes, then dashed out on the stage doing his inimitable crouched walk in a sketch called, “Fun in Hi Skule.”

“To my amazement I found it didn’t hurt my audience acceptance one bit,” Groucho told me. “If anything the laughs were even bigger.”

But the theater manager was outraged when he saw the painted mustache and confronted Groucho about it backstage after the performance.

“What’s with the greasepaint mustache?” he asked Groucho. “I don’t like it.”

“You don’t like it?”

“No. It looks phony.”

“Who cares?” Groucho retorted. “It didn’t hurt the laughs any.”

“I don’t care, Groucho. I paid for a real mustache, and I expect to get one.”

But Groucho refused to back down, and from that moment on, he painted on the mustaches and eyebrows that soon became his trademark.

The painted mustache stayed with him through big time vaudeville, three Broadway hit shows–I’ll Say She Is (1924), Cocoanuts (1926), and Animal Crackers (1928)–and 13 Marx Brothers films, which included The Cocoanuts (1929), Animal Crackers (1930) (both reproductions of the aforementioned Broadway shows), and the classic, A Night at the Opera (1935).

It took the Second World War and an incident in the train station in Washington, D.C., to make him give up the greasepaint mustache.

While with a group of other stars who arrived in the nation’s capital to sell war bonds in 1942, Groucho was shocked to discover that none of the fans waiting at the Union Station train platform recognized him without his makeup. All the other stars, including Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Cary Grant, were besieged by autograph hunters, but Groucho was left standing there with egg on his face. Without his mustache he was a “nobody.”

That settled it. As soon as he returned to his home in Beverly Hills he started to grow a real mustache. Never again would he be upstaged by such low-lifes as Hope, Crosby and Grant. And never again would he have to paint on a mustache in order to be recognized. “I can be a real person and they’ll still know me,” he boasted. “And I won’t have to put on makeup to work.”