Safe As Milk

Please check out The Whiskerino 2005 site for a cool group photo and some nice words from the curator.

I’ve got a lot of photos from the Throwdown in this flickr set. You should check them out.

The Whiskerino, while by definition a ‘beard contest’, wasn’t about any one beard being better than another. The fact that so many random people from different walks of life could get together virtually and create a real community from nothing more than a willingness to grow a beard was the real prize. Even crazier was that so many of the non-local guys (and a handful of the girls) were willing to go to Nashville to celebrate all of that in the real world. The beards were a strange and powerful totem all weekend long. I can totally see where it sounds strange. It was *really* weird to walk into a restaurant on Friday night and see people I had been looking at for months but have no idea how their voice sounded or what their personality was like.

The craziest part was that it didn’t matter. We were all there with the best intentions and the locals were amazingly open with their homes and their city.

People came from everywhere. Of the 50-some-odd Beards that were there, a little over half were from Nashville and the surrounding counties. There were dudes there from NYC, San Diego, Arizona, Scotland (!), RVA, Norfolk, Atlanta, Charlotte, New Orleans, and Detroit that I can think of off the top of my head. There were probably others.

Mike Eades is the man. It was a huge time and I’m glad to have played along with the gang. Now I’m just trying to re-adjust back to a normal, hairless life. I should snap out of this funk in a day or two. Just in time for my berfday.