Waxing Poetic About the Bearded Lady

To be hairy or not to be hairy, that is the question.

Medium writers have lately been weighing in on the topic of beard-growing for men and going au natural for women. This is one of my faves.

Such are the deep topics we dip our collective spoons into as we march through interesting times. Contemplating our (hairy) navels, as it were.

I have a thing or two to say about hair, especially at this age. It’s either moving, leaving altogether or showing (and snowing) up in brand new places.

My father, who was startlingly hirsute, had eyebrows that you could knit into a large afghan. They curled like cascading vines over his glasses. The only time they retreated was during disasters, which were an annual event.

Our small, remote family farm suffered fires every summer in Central Florida. We were outside the jurisdiction of all local fire departments. So, my entire family would spread out with what hoses we had to force back the flames that licked at the edges of our hen houses. Invariably, Dad’s glowering shelf of eye-vines would be singed back for a few weeks, then come flowering back with even greater enthusiasm.

His compact, squared-off body looked a lot like Robin Williams, who sported enough hair for an army of Chewbaccas.

I in-hair-ited a lot of that.

Collective groan.

In puberty I sprouted hobbit-like patches on my toes, to my absolute horror. In a state where barefoot/flipflop was the norm, my stubby toes with their tiny treetops were a deep embarrassment. Not only that, a small patch appeared on the bridges of both feet ( tell me the Universe doesn’t have a sense of humor). Then, centered between my barely-there breasts, I also grew a small, diamond-shaped patch of curling, dark hair that would have made Tom Selleck jealous. My nipples sprouted long, dark, curly hairs, precisely like my father’s eyebrows.

WILL YOU KINDLY PLEASE.

My father was already harassing me for expanding hips, my mother was openly worried about my breasts (or rather, the lack thereof). I was already suffering from body image. Then of course, pimples, blackheads, the garden variety Mother Nature fucking hates me party.

When my pubic hair decided to show up, well. Not only did it grow in as luxuriously as kudzu, it took over the tops of my thighs, threatened to inhabit my knees, then invade the HobbitTown inhabiting my feet.

Then, I grew a mustache.

WILL YOU FUCKING KINDLY, JUST, PLEASE.

To an adolescent kid, a girl, in the Deep South, proper girls didn’t have body hair. Such things weren’t even discussed, much less flouted and luxuriantly as my young body was producing. This was the furry version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. My snatch was taking over.

While the Medium author of the beard story (above) Jacqueline Detwiler writes:

(A beard is) the grooming equivalent of planting a subsistence garden and buying an ax.

I might argue that my explosive, below-the-belt beard was the grooming equivalent of “Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here.”

Long, long before Lumbersexual was a thing, I had signed up.

By the time I was halfway through sixth grade I was ruining my father’s razors at an alarming rate. We were poor enough so that my unapproved hijacking of his precious razor blades could hardly go unnoticed. Just to remove the hair on my upper thighs required an industrial-strength lawnmower. I was discarding hundreds of blunted Gillettes decades before Dollar Shave Club.

On top of that, every time I shaved the septic system backed up.

Razor blades were expensive. I cast around for an answer. I was in desperate straits. I considered alternatives. I blistered more than my fair share of electric razors. Nair not only failed to work but my natural forest used that foul-smelling mash for fertilizer.

I considered natural remedies (arsenic, sulfur, liquid chalk, bats, frog blood and ash with vinegar, if you think I made this up, see this).

Then in the early 1980s, wax. The package I bought had a large, puce-colored block of it, which I gratefully heated up on my stove (this was before microwaves. Yes. There WAS a life before microwaves).

I don’t read instructions. How hard could this possibly be? Heat it, slather it on, you jerk it off. Done.

I marched outside onto my tree-protected balcony in my newly-acquired town (it was still a town) of Denver, and stripped. I was ready to do final battle by giving myself a Brazilian.

In the bright morning sun, I sat naked on a lawn chair. The hot container of wax was cooling steadily in the breeze, balanced on my crotch. I began to gather my Implements of Destruction. One was slightly too far off to my right.

I reached for it.

One of the nice aspects of hot wax is that it cools quickly in high-altitude air. Normally that would be a good thing.

Not in this case.

The warm pot holding the entire block of melted wax tipped over onto my hairy crotch, spreading its contents, far, wide, and south. I didn’t feel a fucking thing.

In the mere seconds that I had pulled the remainder of my implements next to the chair, the wax was already cooled. High altitude does that.

There is no Sixties Saturday afternoon horror film which could possibly have competed with the Green Swamp Thing that now hunkered in my poor privates, sprouting tufts of black hair in all directions, curling into the curves of my upper thighs.

Hardened to concrete.

The ensuing few hours were memorable. I very nearly succeeded in performing an impromptu hysterectomy-without-anesthesia. My girl parts, all parts below and above, including parts that nobody but a porn star (at that time anyway) would wax, got waxed.

I honestly didn’t know I was capable of that kind of volume, either. Leontyne Price had nothing on me.

I had put some on my mustache as well. I still have the scar.

Sigh.

But there is hope.

Some years ago a woman (now retired and in her eighties, and apparently hairless by now) made a comment that I consider hopeful. She was noticing, as she was wending her way towards 70 (where I am) that the hair on her legs was just….disappearing. She was sanguine about it. I would be, too.

However, mine has shown no sign of either abating or disappearing. While evidence of the Shire has indeed retreated from my toes and feet (thank you) I have noticed that an exuberant outdoor rug has begun to sprout from my nose.

You can damned near braid the thing.

WILL YOU FUCKING KINDLY, PLEASE.

And, as is inevitable, the Forest Below, which has yet to respond to six decades of eradication attempts, has simply gone white.

Of course it did.

One cheeky (pun intended) answer to that is Brown Betty, for the “hair down there.”

No. Really. It’s a thing.

However. Given my hairstory, if you will, I will likely come away with a black stain on my ass cheeks the size and shape of Delaware. The pubic hair, of course, will still be white.

Given that my home currently has neither drapes nor blinds, and I suffer the insufferable habit of prancing around naked for a while before I remember that my neighbors are now at home and bored, and all the gun shops have been reduced to empty shelves faster than you can say TOILET PAPER, well.

Someone is going to report the presence of a strange wild monkey and try to shoot it for dinner.

Hair’s to the hirsute. May the bearded lady come in back in vogue before I expire.