Last week, my husband was the same clean-shaven guy I married 17 years ago at a cheesy Reno theme motel.
This week, he's some Burt Reynolds wannabe, and the cheesy motel has been replaced by a cheesy moustache that smells like cheese and, at one time or another, has probably had cheese in it.
It's Movember. If you haven't yet been introduced to the concept of Movember, it's an annual month-long moustache-growing fundraising and awareness campaign between Nov. 1 and 30 aimed at raising money to fight prostate cancer and other health issues that affect men, including testicular cancer and depression.
It started in 2003 with a few Australians growing their "mo's," and today more than one million people around the world drop their razors and surrender their upper lips to whatever kind of hair growth their bodies can support.
Men sign up for the effort at Movember.com and as their mo's take shape, they enlist the help of friends and family to donate. As for the mo (short for moustache), it prompts informative discussions that lead to greater awareness about men's health.
In my household, Movember is all that and more.
First, there is the careful decision about which mo to grow and each option is analyzed for quality, upkeep and facial conformity. Will it be the Pencil, the Super Mario, the Copstash, the Handlebar, the Fu Manchu, the Dali or some wiry freestyle thing that hasn't been categorized yet? Then there is the daily ritual of grooming. This is a painstaking process that involves an electric razor taking up the only free outlet in the bathroom at the worst possible moment and little hairs peppering every flat surface.
And finally, the most annoying aspect of Movember: getting into character. This year, as stated, Burt Reynolds is a guest in our house. More specifically, it's Burt Reynolds' character, Bo, from the 1977 redneck road-trip movie, Smokey and the Bandit.
In the movie, Bo "Bandit" Darville is hired to lead a convoy of bootlegged beer from Texas to Georgia in his Trans-Am. Sally Field plays his love interest, Carrie,
and there is also a dog named Fred who comes along for the ride. It sounds like aB movie, but Smokey and the Bandit was the fourth highest-grossing movie of that year, behind Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Saturday Night Fever.
So for the past week, my newly moustachioed husband has been calling me Carrie, calling our dog Fred and jokingly browsing newspaper classifieds for a Pontiac Trans-Am. At least I hope he's joking.
He's also been reciting famous lines from the movie, of which there are exactly none, leading to mass confusion among our regular coffee baristas and other members of the public we chat up regularly.
But I'll grant him all of this for Movember because it's for a great cause.
Prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer among Canadian men, and this year, almost 4,000 men in Canada will die from it. Testicular cancer is more prevalent in young men, and, if detected early, has a survival rate of 95 per cent. Depression, meanwhile, will affect 11 per cent of Canadian men.
If you want to learn more, visit movember.com or go talk to someone sporting a moustache because I gotta go. Someone just called for "Carrie."
