I was washing my hands in the sink at my office bathroom today, and I looked into the mirror--a mirror I have looked into several hundred times before. Something was new. There, perched nattily on my upper lip, was a shadow. A shadow?
I thought, "Surely it must be dirt!" and grabbed a paper towel, moistened it, and used it to scrub at my upper lip. Nothing came off but a trace of face powder. The shadow, who I was starting to think of as "Pierre," did not move.
I dashed across the way to the office of a girlfriend of mine. She's known me for a long time, and knows when I need an honest answer. "Have I always had a moustache, or did it just show up this morning?" I demanded. She looked closely at me. "I think it is a recent development," she replied. "It makes you look like a Mexican man. Have you tried to wash it off?"
"Damn it," I said. "Good thing I'm going to my hair stylist this afternoon. She can wax this thing to kingdom come."
My hair appointment rolled around, and my stylist looked closely at Pierre. "I can't see anything but some very fine blonde hair," she said. Then, as she was waxing my eyebrows, she said, "Hmm." "Hmm?" I said. "I think we'd better wax your upper lip," she decided.
Let me tell you, and this is as a woman who has had pretty much everything but her armpits waxed before (even I am not that crazy), that friggin' HURT. My stylist warned me, I have to admit. And there, on the cloth strip, was the sad remains of Pierre. Or so I thought. I got in the car to come home, looked in my rearview mirror, and there it is--the shadow. I washed my face extra well tonight, and it is still there.
The only thing more disheartening than early-onset facial hair is an inexplicable, unremovable shadow on your lip that looks like a moustache, but isn't.
