Dying Gaul mustache
I looked at photos of Sam Elliott the actor yesterday, having found a website with “the best mustaches of Sam Elliott” or something like that. I settled upon his mustache from the film Did You Hear About the Morgans? as my favorite, and noticed how in all his mustaches he combed them straight down with a clean line across (and the mustache generally covered his upper lip); sometimes the wings on either side were longer, and these either got combed down, or slightly outward; in Did You Hear there was almost a horizontal line to the mustache, and the longer wings on either end got combed outward in a way that preserved the line. Then, somehow, I found a photo of The Dying Gaul, an ancient Roman statue in marble, a copy of an original in bronze, in the Capitoline Museums on the Campidoglio. The statue has short-medium length cropped hair, a short, handsome mustache, gorgeous features, a ponderous expression, and a wonderful physique (alas, he’s dying). I think of my final months at Sony when I was growing my hair in, wanting a shaggy look and hair I could brush behind my ears. Eric humored me, cutting a little here, a little there, every time I went in. Finally one time he held a mirror over the crown of my head, showed me how it really looked, and convinced me to leave the top long, and go short on the sides and the back and do something more “handsome.” I was reluctant, but nevertheless convinced by the sight of my own apparently thinning crown. And I was sad to let my hair go. Once I saw the new cut coming into being, and then finally when it was finished, it was the most handsome I had ever seen myself—and handsome was the word for it. When I had had my super short military cuts, with just a patch on the top of my head barely long enough to comb across to the side, or when I had my cut with the part shaved into it, I was cute, I was sexy, but I wasn’t a handsome man like I was now. That was the day I went to Clark’s to buy my grayish-tan desert boots, and seeing myself in the windows of different stores in Soho I felt like a model.
Is it time I do the same with the mustache, and sacrifice the length I’m so proud of having achieved, for a look more classic and handsome?
I said to Mom on the phone yesterday, “What looks good on Sam Elliott might not look good on me. And what looks good on me might not look good on Sam Elliott.”