By Robert Washburn
One of my students was doing a video for a Movember story. He was asking a set of questions to each of the members of the Loyalist Mo-crew, the team of journalism students raising money for prostate cancer research.
After a few standard questions, like “Why are you doing this?”, he quickly asked me if my moustache had a pet name.
Huh?
Caught totally off guard, I was completely silenced by the question. It threw me off. And, I laughed so hard. What a great question. Sadly, I had no answer. Anthropomorphizing my moustache is not in the cards for me.
Then, he asked another great question: “If your moustache was a movie, what would the title be?”
Again, I laughed at the sheer brilliance of the idea. It caught me off balance once more. No answer.
Well, now that time has passed and there was a chance to give it some thought, I started thinking about Clint Eastwood in a Fistful of Dollars. That’s right, the the man-with-no-name. His moustache matches mine right now. It is not quiet there. Half-grown. Scruffy under the nose. It is not full, like Kurt Russell in Tombstone. No, Eastwood’s moustache was there because he hadn’t shaved in a couple of weeks, just like me. Given the chance, he would shave it off. But when you are a gunfighter playing two rival families off of each other, you don’t have time to get to the barber for proper grooming. Too many people getting killed or trying to kill him. So you grow a scrawny, prickly moustache, just like his character in the movie.
So, that is it: Fistful of Dollars.
And, maybe I have a pet name for my moustache now: The moustache with no name.