(Thomas Froese Photo)
(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, July 26, 2025)
Why can’t women grow beards? They’re so remarkable. Men, really, have no idea how fortunate they are. My wife tells me this all the time.
“Babe,” she says, pretty well every time she sees me, “You know how passionately I love beards and that rugged mountain-man look. Would you, for me, grow a Rip Van Winkle beard that’s long enough to trip over? Or even one of those bushy baseball beards?”
I tend to keep my modest goatee short. No need to have yesterday’s lunch or the dog’s ball or some backyard squirrel getting lost in there. Even so, growing a wild beard could be a heritage project. Mennonites, after all, had baseball beards before baseball players did.
My great-great-great-great-great Mennonite grandfather wouldn’t have been the storyteller that I imagine he was if he couldn’t throw back his head with his substantial hair and beard cascading like a lion’s mane, this to warm up his audience. His wife, I’m sure, deeply enjoyed this also.
Then there’s George Bernard Shaw, neither a Mennonite nor a baseball player, but a playwright with the sort of serious beard that women would go for in any century. It was 1925 when Shaw received the Nobel Prize for Literature, maybe for his wit as much as his idealism and humanity.
Which leads us to today’s fun fact. Today, July 26, is Shaw’s birthday.
The Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, the second largest repertory theatre company in North America, continues Shaw’s legacy. I mean, have you seen some of the beards around the place?
Now you can be a walking billboard for Shaw with a t-shirt showing one of his quips. Consider: “You see things and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were and I say, ‘Why not?’ ”
Or, “I often quote myself. It adds spice to the conversation.” (Do you think some wet-behind-the-ears, clean-shaven man could think of this?) Then there’s every senior’s favourite: “Youth is wasted on the young.”
Yes, if you like running around with whitening facial hair while in shorts and bare feet – there I am, all year long – this is the attire for you. It shows old Shaw as a fun rascal in some ancient and sexy swimsuit looking like a white-bearded Moses as much as an Irish playwright.
That beard is what surely must have helped Shaw write until he was good and ripe, to the age of 94, when he died, in 1950, days after falling off a ladder while pruning a tree on his London-area property. He was clearly one of those people who sucked the marrow out of life.
He had some eccentricities, sure, including a quirky relationship with food, like meat, which he, in fact, didn’t eat. And he had a strange fondness for authoritarianism. Ugly politicians like Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin apparently bothered him less than, say, bad grammar.
But there’s no indication that Shaw’s wife of 45 years, Charlotte, a woman’s rights activist who came from an impossibly wealthy family, ever doubted the virtuous and redeeming value of her husband’s beard. Unlike Samson’s Delilah, she never took scissors to any of her man’s hair.
In either case, the truth is that I can’t compete. And my wife, I know you suspect, isn’t a fan of beards. So as a different sort of gift for our anniversary, Tuesday, I’m now shaving. To everything there’s a season. Today’s plan is for her to first read here this exciting news of my razor before I appear for her to see and feel my smooth face for the first time in a long time.
Happy Anniversary, Babe.
“Man shaves his modest goatee.” Hardly the world’s biggest news. “Saint Nicholas shaves big white beard.” Now there’s a headline. But facial hair in this corner? “Es kommt. Es geht.” (It comes. It goes.) Now it’s history again, like this column, which, with any luck, even Old Man Shaw might have found mildly amusing on this, his summer day.