I'm Wesley Morris, I am a critic at The New York Times and I wrote an essay about my mustache.

I know what you're thinking. The mother of all elections is like 10 minutes away. And here I am about to tell you a story about some stuff on my face. But just bear with me and I'll tell you why. I grew this thing the way a lot of people did a lot of things for the first time or out of boredom or curiosity during this pandemic to stave off the misery outside our windows and front doors, I decided with my friend Brian to grow a mustache.

And so we get on the phone one day we do a zoom call and he reveals his and it's not good. By his own admission, it is a handlebar mustache, not his thing. And mine is a little more traditional, it is a short, sharp thing that we both agreed look pretty good. And he got rid of his I decided to keep mine and it felt to me like the most right thing I had done with my face in my entire adult life.

I don't really know why I kept it, except it was speaking to me and I was trying to hear what it was saying, and one day I was on a different call with a different friend, my friend Akita, and she kind of put the whole thing in perspective for me and it cracked my life open. I don't think I'm going to be the same person after that. And it is entirely connected to what this thing on my face makes me feel and connects me to.

In many ways, I want to thank Brian for making us go on this dare, and I want to thank my friend Nikita for saying what she said to make me think about my whole life. I'm getting a little emotional, just thinking about that. But, yeah, I, I wanted to try to write it through. And what you're about to hear is the result. Here is my essay, My Mustache, read by Deon Graham. Like a lot of men in pursuit of novelty and amusement during these months of isolation, I grew a mustache.

The reviews were predictably mixed and predictably predictable. Pawni Yes, creepy, obviously 70s through the 18 and 19, 70s on some video calls I heard rugged and extra gay. Someone I love called me Zahedi. Children were harsh. My 11 year old nephew told his Minecraft friends that his uncle has this moustache. The mid game disgust was audible through his headset in August. I spent two weeks with my niece, who's seven. She would rise each morning, dismayed anew to be spending another day looking at the hair on my face.

Once she climbed on my back and began combing the mustache with her fingers, whispering in the warmest tones of endearment. Uncle Wesley, when are you going to shave this thing off? It hasn't been all bad. Halfway through a quick stop and chat outside a friend's house in July, he and I removed our masks and exploded at the side of each other. No way, mustache. That's been video meetings, searching amid the boxes for other mustaches to admire the way they enhance eyes and redefine faces with a force of irreversible handsomeness.

The way Burt Reynolds never made the same kind of sense without his the moustache aged me, people didn't mind letting me know that either. But so what? They pulled me past mature to a particular kind of distinguished, it looks fetching, for instance, with suits. I currently have no logical reason to wear. One afternoon on a group call to celebrate a friend's good news, somebody said what I didn't know I needed to hear. More reviews were pouring in, thumbs down mostly, but I was already committed at that point.

I just didn't know to what. That's when my friend chimed in. You look like a lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

What I remember was laughter. But where someone might have sensed shade being thrown, I experienced the opposite. A light had been shown, it was said as a winking correction and an earnest clarification. Y'all, this is what it is. The call moved on, but I didn't. That is what it is. One of the sweetest, truest things anybody had said about me in a long time. My friend had identified a mighty American tradition and placed my face within it.

Any time 20th century black people found themselves entangled in racialized peril, any time the roots of racism pushed up some new hideous weed, a thoughtful looking, solemn, seeming, crisply attired gentleman would be photographed entering a courthouse or seated somewhere, a library in the living room alongside the wronged and imperiled. He was probably a lawyer and he was likely to have been moustached. Thurgood Marshall started the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Legal Defense and Education Fund 80 years ago.

It still exists. Sherrilyn Ifill is in charge. The world's most famous cases include Shellie versus Kramer, which in effect forbade landlords from refusing to rent to black people and Brown vs. Board of Education, the crown jewel in the funds. Many school desegregation challenges. Marshall was essentially the civil rights movements legal strategist and in case after case, he arrived at the Supreme Court in elegant tailoring and sharp haircuts. A decade later, Marshall was on the court and any time he'd done that robe and those horn rimmed spectacles, every time he shined at oral arguments, he did so wearing a mustache.

The glasses and jowls emphasized his famous air of wisdom. The moustache bestowed a grounding flourish in 1954 when the court ruled in Brown. It wasn't so rare to see a mustached man. They were a common feature among blue collar Joes. Charlie Chaplin and Errol Flynn had been stars, and the country hadn't quite finished with Clark Gable. Ernest Hemingway had a line, the mustache, with distinctly American ideas of masculine bravado, concision and sport. But a mustache could also be a softer a Gracenote.

A mustache advertised a certain commitment to civility on a man like Gable. It embellished his rough edges, gave his characters chauvinism a classy place to land. On black men, a moustache told a different story, it was fashionable, but it was more than that on a black man. It signified values, perseverance, seriousness, rigor. Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Jacob Lawrence, Gordon Parks, Albert Murray, John Lewis, Vivian Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Bayard Rustin, Joseph Lowery, Fred Shuttlesworth, Julius L Chambers, Jesse Jackson, Josea Williams.

Adam Clayton Powell Jr.. Elijah Cummings. Mustaches all. Classics, it should be noted that the superstar ideological iconoclast among the freedom fighters, Malcolm X, did battle accordingly. He was the only prominent American leader of any race with a goatee. In the days after that, congratulations, Videocon, the euphoria of having been tagged as part of some illustrious legacy tapered off. The moustache, it certainly can join me to a past I was flattered to be associated with, however superficially, but there were implications.

During the later stages of the movement, a mustached man opened himself up to charges of white appeasement and Uncle Tom ism, not because of the moustache, obviously, but because of the approach of the sort of person who would choose to wear one. Such a person might not have been considered radical enough, down enough, black enough. The civil rights moustache was strategically tolerant. It didn't advocate burning anything down. It ran for office and sometimes it won. It was establishmentarian, compromising and eventually come.

The Inferno's at the close of the 1960s, it fell out of fashion, in part because it fell out of step with the urgency of the moment. The black moustache didn't end with the disillusionments of the post civil rights era, Jim Brown, Stevie Wonder, Richard Roundtree builded Williams, Lionel Richie, Sherman Hemsley, Carl Weathers, James Brown, Arsenio Hall and Eddie Murphy wore one.

It's just that no higher calling officially united them, their moustaches were freelance signatures, the mark of an individual rather than a people's emblem. At some point in the 1970s and through at least 1980, Muhammad Ali grew one you could attach to a broom handle. Donnie Simpson hosted BET's video Soul with a tapered number and a silky smoothness that could line a tuxedo jacket threw a rock at an old Jet magazine from the 1980s. You'll hit somebody's moustache, but well before then, the politics of self presentation had coalesced around grander, less deniable hair.

They migrated to the Aphro. A mustache might have been a dignified symbol in the pursuit of equality, but there was nothing inherently black about it. A mustache meant business, an afro manpower. I knew before this summer's Black Lives Matter protests that my moustache made me look like a Bujji race man, a professional, seemingly humorless middle class Negro, a moderate who believes that presentation is a crucial component of the advancement, part of the NAACP mission, someone who doesn't mind a little respectability because he believes his people deserve respect.

It's a look to ponder as the country finds itself turning once again over a ceaseless questions of advancement and justice and the right to be left the hell alone. I live a street over from a thoroughfare where the protests happened almost nightly in June and July. I could hear their approach from my living room. One evening, I stood at a corner, moved as thousands of people, past friends, colleagues, co-workers, some guy went on a blind date with a million years ago, chanting, brandishing banners and buttons.

Some protesters had their fists raised in a black power salute. So I raised mine. Not a gesture I would normally make, but there was something about seeing so many white people lifting their arms that goaded me into doing it to man kept lowering itself so I had to jerk it to its fullest, most committed extension. I felt out of control like Edward Norton throwing himself around his boss's office in Fight Club, like the kleptomaniac that Tippi Hedren played in Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie, trying to palm a stack of cash, but her arm just won't pick it up.

At some point, I stopped straining, this wasn't the struggle I came for, plus a friend told me later that I had made my fist wrong.

The black power salute is not a casual gesture, its weaponry, you aim that arm and fire. I aimed mine in solidarity with white people instead of at a system they personify. And that didn't feel quite right. But how would I know? I had never done a black power salute. It always seemed like more blackness than I've needed, maybe more than I had. I'm not black power black. I've always been milder, more apprehensive than that. I was practically born with a moustache.

I grew up in Philadelphia in the 1980s. My mother left my father when my sister and I was small. I took the divorce just fine, except for the stealing I used to collect quarters from my mother's change person before class feed them to the arcade consoles at the 7-Eleven near school. First, though, I would discreetly jam handfuls of one cent candy into my pockets. The quarters were never meant to cover that for two weeks in the second grade.

This is how my mornings began until I got caught. The store manager called my mother and in the uncomfortably long wait for her arrival, I sat there wallowing in regret. But she never showed. My father, she must have phoned him. He walked me home to the house he no longer lived in and spanked me first, I suppose. Then he calmly walked me to school. On the way, he explained with uncharacteristic gravity that because I was black, I needed to be very careful about my behavior.

Nobody should steal and we especially should. He was a track coach, and that was one of the few times he ever coached me. It's perhaps absurd to point to one childhood incident and declare it decisive, but I've always found that story useful. It's rich in disappointment, embarrassment, shame and guilt. My mother needed those boys. They were carfare and the kids at school now knew I was a thief. I was so ashamed that I bowed at six that I never wanted to feel like that again.

I had a moral near-death experience. From there on, I would be good. That was the vow. Support for this podcast and the following message come from E-Trade, you want to invest your money, but there's one problem you're not sure where to begin. Luckily, there's ETrade, who offers more than just trading. E-Trade simplifies investing without the financial jargon and has the people to offer guidance and support to make your money work hard for you. For more information, visit E-Trade dot com slash the daily E-Trade Securities LLC member FINRA Sipek.

Good men trying hard and helping out and listening and being a devoted friend. It meant only the best news for my parents and being liked. But goodness, as a personal policy is strange for a child to have. It's for grown ups, not for kids. Teachers like good kids some teachers prefer than the kind of goodness I'm talking about is suspicious to other kids. Kids don't want to catch you abstaining from trouble or raising your hand or staying behind after school to help out or worse, to hang.

I went to the same small, mostly black private school from 3rd grade until graduation, that kind of goodness sometimes got classified as white. It wasn't exactly kids like me, but we all seem to realize that now I had a genre. I don't recall making a conscious equation between goodness and whiteness, but I watched TV and went to movies and devoured comic books and music videos in which most of the people were white. I made identifications by internalize things.

I watched almost every episode of two popular sitcoms in which rich white people adopt black orphans. Hip hop had only begun its pursuit of world domination. It was still just rap, but I preferred pop music and liked it. When a rap song push it, just a friend going back to Cali crossed from black radio to everybody else's. The crossing over was validating. Pop was proof not of selling out, but of a kind of goodness.

I never suffered any major drama about being black or being gay, a stretch of the sixth grade featured me talking like Jackie Harry, who played the flamboyantly congested sexpot Sandra on two. I just understood that there were Strato and somewhere among them were my proper diction and peg jeans. I made myself an individual and was never tortured too terribly for it.

I had a little room of my own and a wider black world than Carlton Moody. Carlton was Will Smith's rich conservative cousin on the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, the show ran on NBC from nineteen ninety to nineteen ninety six and was another black adoption sitcom. Only the rich family was black.

Carlton was the middle kid, bellowing Lee, insensitive, preppy and Ralph Lauren. Everything deafened by the setting on Will's blackness to will. Carlton's familiarity with whiteness made him indistinguishable from him early in season one. When a family friend chooses Carlton and not Will to drive his fancy car to Palm Springs as a favor, a miffed will asks.

This is a black thing, isn't it? On the road, Carlton offers Will a snack. What do you say to an Oreo? Will answers. What's up, Carlton? Carlton's erudition and country club style panic will whose own approach to blackness becomes an overcompensation for his proximity to affluence, his blackness is a thing he performs for an audience, but mainly for himself. In season two, Uncle Phil tells Will that he's proud of it, that he's just like his son.

It's a compliment that induces a nervous breakdown. I'm turning into Carlton, Will says no more. These sissy sandwiches, no more valet parking and no more of these preppy parties, man. He then destroys the two hundred dollar check that he kissed up to Uncle Phil to write him and says, Yo, the funky fresh is back in the flesh with a vengeance. Holmes It's stunning enough the equation of intelligence with emasculation and whiteness with lunch will sandwiches. But when he's finished, the audience erupts in cheers.

Nobody watching wanted Will to become good. They wanted him to stay black. I didn't know who Carlton was until I was presumed to be him in school and my weekend movie theater job in the checkout line at The Gap, he equipped the young and perplexed with a shorthand for bright square oddballs who weren't quite nerds. Nerds were easy. They were Steve Urkel, the geek from Family Matters in high school. There were a few of us oddballs. I, alas, was the lone Karlton, but a crucial part of the equation always felt off.

Carlton epitomized the hazardous comedy of racial estrangement. Even his assertions of blackness were men in irony, like the time in Season one when Wil bested his cousin wouldn't last long in Compton and Carlton winds up dressed like a gangster. His sudden abundance of blackness was supposedly funnier because we were well versed in his alleged lack of it. But sometimes I wondered, was he really an exemplar of blackness, rigidity, or could he have been an exploration of its parameters?

Could I. I don't think it mattered back then, these were teenagers, they weren't looking for the nuances of who anybody was, they were will in search of the easiest path to jokes that distracted from their insecurities. And the path from Carlton to me was admittedly not an arduous one to forge. This would have been asking a lot of a network sitcom, but I sometimes wondered about the blackness of Carlton's inner life and its correspondence to my. One of the proudest secondhand moments of my adolescence was the Wimbledon tennis tournament, in which an unseeded Laurie McNeill stopped Steffi Graf title defense in the first round and almost made it to the final.

I like Steffi Graf. But Lauri McNeill, how did Carlton catch any of that? Did he love it when a curmudgeon like Stanley Crouch, a reality checker like Julianne Malveaux or a sage like Toni Morrison, would show up on some talk show and just go on and on about whatever the hosts might have seemed prepared for, the erudite truth of what they had to say, but often seemed taken aback by the precise blackness of its deployment.

The joke of Carlton was that he adored Tom Jones and danced like Belinda Carlisle. But surely he could sense that the 1980s and 1990s were a bounteous age. When anything goes kind of blackness, Prince will be Golberg. Jermaine Stewart, Janet Jackson, Flavor Flav. The first time I saw a wetsuit was on Corey Glover, who sang in the band Living Colour for black guys who built their hard rock on a base layer of rhythm and blues raps, you had diversified enough to include Afrocentric hippies like Arrested Development and hippie dorks like De la Soul.

Lenny Kravitz was another hippie, but nobody in my life seemed to take his funk. Rock is spiritually as I did to them. It was cheesy and ripped off. I expected this music for a blackness that comported with mine and every time felt the thrill of pure ID. Carlton really got to make any such discovery, his cluelessness was too useful an asset, he was the bane of my adolescence. But I came to feel for him and despise the trap he was in.

Every once in a while, though, somebody involved with that show would let him be the littlest bit loose at the end of the Compton episode. This happens, Carlton. I never judge you for being the way you are, but you always act like I don't measure up to some rule of blackness that you carry around. Will you treat me like I'm some kind of idiot just because I talk different Carlton differently? The show just kept shaking the Etch a Sketch, resetting Carleton's self-awareness and Will's insensitivity to it.

But I understood what Will's ilk ignored.

The Orio had a soul during that stretch in high school. I grew a mustache. It was a classic right of male puberty. I grew up because I could get it because it didn't violate a dress code and was grateful for it because it probably helped tame the homophobes.

Just about every boy in my graduating class had something sprouting above him that wispy, ghostly, cheesy, but certifiably masculine. That's also why people called me Kalt, because I bore the vaguest resemblance to Alfonso over there, the actor who plays we both talked funny, dressed, funny, danced, and we both it must be said he had a mustache on my way to college. I got rid of it, hoping to exercise crocked and it didn't go with the look I wanted to take with baggy t shirts and baggy pants with either Doc Martens or a pair of Chuck Taylors.

I had two beloved t shirts. Travis Bickle, the taxi driver Psycho was printed on one. The other was stripe, thin and red, green, black and yellow, which struck me as in some way African, even though it was not. My older cousin Leon bought me a 40 acres and a mule baseball cap from Spike Lee's merchandise shop. No filmmaker mattered more to my teenage self, but I was perpetually concerned that somebody might ask what the 40 acres were all about here.

I was nervous about the call for reparations atop top my head when there was a homicidal maniac staring out from my chest. Even then, I couldn't make a fist. I went to Yale, which until recently offered an orientation camp for several dozen non-white students to bond. It was a week of sitting around exploiting the pretext of food and talent shows to luxuriate in the personalities and tastes and lives of potential new friends. It was exciting finding these kindred souls.

Every once in a while, one of us would pause our little paradise to laugh at the absurdity of it all. The program's acronym was Prop and Ponder the Looming Menace. Where we being warned? The program was a rather stunning admission on the college's part, this is a white place, you all are going to need to keep one another from drowning. Lots of us have gone to integrated schools. We could swim. I swam. But there's a way that for certain non-white people, especially if you're a poor life at a liberal arts college, especially a so-called elite one, can feel like the reward for all of that being good.

Maybe you've beaten some odds to get there and your prize for all of the effort. And let's face it, all of the luck is, yes, a premium education, but also living among white people. But first first you must exemplify your people, be a diplomat for them and an ambassador to the white people to whom you always might seem foreign. No one ever puts it that way, the structure does the talking. No black first year student I knew at Yale had a black roommate.

If a professor put James Baldwin or Toni Morrison into and Changey or August Wilson on a syllabus, you as the section's sole black person, would be gazed at until you got the discussion started, expected to approve your section mate's analysis and withstand their insinuations. There were several ways to receive such a position against aggrieved in acquiescence with authority. I eventually own the situation, but it created delusions, I at least went through a brief, shameful period of high peacocke during which my stage name could have been Mr.

Black experience. Prolonged loneliness winds up a budding exceptionalism. The alternatives never felt to me like improvement's. Take the athlete from Southern California, whom I ran into during a terrible evening, he was having our first year, the pressure to declare his blackness that snapped him. He didn't want to merely be some black guy. He just wanted to be here. There was no consolation. We ran into each other from time to time. He pledged one of the big white fraternities and seemed to enjoy its spoils.

I still think about him. What were the rest of his four years like? Mine remain four of my best. I was happy only this summer have I taking any deep stock of the time I had there, how acculturation can breed estrangement, how I ended up with a comfortable life. I've got one urgent demand of this moment is for people, workplaces and institutions to reckon with their whiteness. Why not reckon with my day after day of video calls?

We'll do that. I sat there on work meetings and friend hangouts and family catch ups and stared into people's homes telling who's in my world regretting nothing but simply absorbing how solidly white and discretely non-white the parties are and how it all feels. Traceable to a morning, I got caught stuffing my pockets with Jolly Ranchers. After graduation, during the decade and a half I spent working at newspapers in San Francisco and Boston, I embarked on a life that featured increasingly fewer black people at the office, in restaurants, on the streets.

It was less an ambition than ambitions consequence. Some days it felt as if the rapture had occurred and taken all the black people to Atlanta. Houston. Even as I basked in the fortune of my life, loneliness performed its gentle Tintern tabulations. San Francisco once had a good black run soul food place called Powles. I sat down there almost every month just to have a base to touch. I talked about moving to Oakland, but never did in Boston.

I had a couple of weird years with men. After a political convention in 2004, I took home a guy from South Carolina who seduced me with talk about the difference he planned to make as a black politician. On the walk to the subway the next morning, I all but asked him to take me to Charleston. That was the end of that. I wasn't thinking of the people in my life as just white people. These were my co-workers, my friends, one of those friends applied a similar logic to me the same week that a Minneapolis police officer killed Fernando Castillo.

He found me in grief. And I told him that I've always harbored a murmuring awareness that I could be shot. He was incredulous, how could that happen to me? I went to a good school and had a good job. I was black but not killed during a police stop black. I was good. I can imagine a version of myself that having completed Yale and succeeded professionally, would have heard that response and felt relieved that I was one of racism's carve outs.

I was me only. I've always felt more lucky than exceptional. I can now see that my vow of goodness was an existential shift of shape. Having been told early on that unreasonable obstacles awaited, I set about finding a form that could easily evade them.

There is, I suppose, another hand wherein I take further stock and declare a folly. The entire affair of race is a joke. My life is mine. No strings, no speed traps. Why overthink it? And the moustache? Come on. It's called a pandemic trend. I made bread on my face. One's race is not one's self. I know this and strive to leave it at that. But I never get far. In the United States, a black self eventually discovers his race is a form of credit or discredit, as it were.

You can't leave home without it yet. For as long as black Americans have been conscious of their blackness, some public intellectual has cried. Hoke's, you black person are free for you to be a person, you can rapture yourself. American literature reserves a corner for characters who have plotted escape the passing now wherein black people eke out a sad white life. Certainly a logic for leaving exists. I must admit I do feel free often in precisely the way that friend of mine insisted I must, because my fears haven't yet come true.

I could, in theory, join the black exit campaign and leave. If not the race, then certainly the sort of thinking that believes racism is a form of determinism affecting the choices we make as individuals.

I've tried to empathize with this thinking, and I'm always surprised that. I can't close the deal. You might recall that before he became America's most notorious double murder, acquitted, O.J. Simpson insisted he wasn't black either. He, alas, was O.J.. Ensnare it within the criminal justice system has this tragic way of clarifying who you are. Simpson emerged from that national disaster redefined by the blackness he forsook lately and most cantankerous. It's Kanye West who has been daring to level with us.

His early musical pushes against black orthodoxy have mutated over the last four years into pleas for black people to stop it with the racism talk to get over it. Essentially, his vision for transcendence of racism, if not race itself, would be easier to share if he didn't appear to lead straight into the arms of racists. I don't believe in that kind of transcendence. I'm not a black here, some person who is still convinced that we live in post-racial times.

If anything, I'm a Bolex essentialist. I encountered something like Barack Obama's Dreams from my father, which is steadfastly the opposite of the passing experience and feast on his decades long search for a black self that suits him. It's a finding book, a story of becoming. As the black tent expands, the people beneath it can keep doing as they've always done, widening its poles. I have wondered, though, what kind of spiral I would have taken had the friend on that video call not said NAACP lawyer, if she had looked at my face and said, you look like Clarence Thomas or Herman Cain or Ben Carson, Carson's goatee has on occasion been only a mustache.

What if she had pinned me to a bootstraps mentality that rejects racism as the root of injustice, that believes your own responsibility? I would have felt cornered, I suppose personal accountability is a nothing this country just won't let it be all the extent number of black firsts rares only Nevers not yet and not quite attests to that, as does the chronic to menace to orphans and to Sounes. I like to think that I would have absorbed her Clarence Thomas and regaled her with a separate lineage, I would have told her that I hail from a long line of family mustaches.

Uncle Jeans made him look famous. Uncle Jack's got bushy after World War Two and pretty much stayed that way. My grandmother's last husband, Jimmy, wore his in a style best described as sharpened. How did she kiss that thing and not need stitches? Her first husband, my grandfather, kept his barely. They're both. Their sons had one. Her brother Marcellus liked his then my mother, like my stepfather's because, well, she loved him. My father had his bases, three of his brothers had been to the forest Uncle Bill at a NASCAR.

Had you ever met Uncle Bill, you would conclude that the Ascott essentially was a mustache. It might just have been simpler to say who didn't have one who did. I don't know what everybody's politics were, but as a clan, we were a Thanksgiving spread, a little of everything and nothing so outrageous that the advancement of colored people would ever be off the table. These were working men, providers, not activists, but voters, certainly. Their moustaches strike me now as a generational phenomenon.

These people were all born between 1920 and 1950 of their children, only my cousins, Butchy and Kyle, are describable as mustache men. This is why I've kept my. It's me squeezing my way into a parallel heritage in this small sense, the work I do caring for it feels connected to a legacy of people who did and do the work, chipping at and thinking with this nation. The good work. Something obvious in just about any photograph taken of black Americans during the civil rights era is how put together everyone is.

They wore to war what they wore to church. The country was watching. People got dressed up to withstand being put down. They dressed with full awareness that an outfit risked ruin skirts, twisted round glasses, cracked ribbons undone, hair soaked fabric stained with mustard cream and blood. What that didn't stand a good chance of permanent separation from is where what a fine pair of shoes didn't risk meeting its doom a moustache, though hard to mar one of those.

It was a magisterial vestige of elegance in defiance. It couldn't be snatched at yanked. It held its ground no matter how many times a nightstick or fist might attempt to remove it. I look at those pictures and wonder about getting dressed for contempt. About grooming oneself for it. Maintaining a mustache requires a surgical delicacy, a practiced lightness. I tend to save it for last, strenuously avoiding that part of a shave for as delighted as I am by the sound of the scraping of the blade against my skin, some doubt never fails to creep into the mustache stage.

It's a dismount match point. Can I close this out? Is this going to be the shave? The mustache doesn't survive. I have a dream that I've lost it, that I just leapt off my face and I chased it around my house, destroying it is always possible. But you're more likely just to turn it into something else, something you would be terrified to wear. Mine is actually a preemption. I go with the Denzel Washington in Philadelphia because I don't trust that I have the hands for the Denzel of Devil in a Blue Dress.

This is also to say that for the righteous and wayward alike, the process entails a disturbance of the line between vanity and knowledge of self. In twenty eighteen, Martin Luther King Jr.'s, former barber Nelson Malden spoke to Alabama Public Radio about grooming King. He was more concerned about his moustache than his haircut. He always liked his mustache to be up off the lip like a butterfly. He would tell me, make it like a butterfly.

This time it's grueling work, the business of becoming a butterfly, long, ugly periods of churn and slog. But then you have this, like, fluttering thing. It might have seemed inadequate or incongruous, at least for King to grip the sides of a lectern to tell congregants that they were all striving to bring the nation closer to embodying the hair beneath his nose. But when you know that he thought of his look, is bespeaking a kind of weightlessness?

You could also surmise that he knew the price of such flight might be life itself.

He was trying to align the country with that moustache. But we're working on it. Make it like a butterfly. This was recorded by autumn. Autumn is an app you can download to listen to lots of audio stories from publishers such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and The Atlantic.