Happy Birthday Mr. President

For Lincoln's birthday, 2007, I dressed up as the former president and wore this outfit to work. I had great fun and brought a lot of smiles to people's faces. I got my share of strange looks also. I called myself Drubraham Lincoln. There is a story as to why I decided to actually grow (and yes, color) the beard and I will probably modify the page shortly to reflect it. For now, enjoy. Each picture does link to a slightly larger photo if you feel the need to torture yourself further.

And now the story. Every year, the folks at work participate in an annual celebration of manliness. We call it moustache solidarity month or MSM for short. During this month, everyone in the shop attempts to grow the best moustache they can. The women, so far, have been pretty unsuccessful (thank goodness), but we have gotten some good ones from the guys. Well, Hillary Clinton did participate a couple years ago - ok it was a spoof, but kinda funny (see it here). For the military guys, a moustache is all they can grow, and the regulations keep the cool factor pretty low on what you can do to it, so most do not wear a moustache. But, if you are seeing this page, then you probably know that I almost always wear a moustache and since I am a civilian now, I can grow what I want. So another civilian and myself grew full beards while most of the other guys did ok on their temporary moustache. Getting toward the end of the month, several of the guys were whining that their wives did not like their new look, or they didn't like it or whatever. I could tell that it wasn't gonna take long and they were just going to throw in the towel and quit. I conned them in to hanging on a few days more and I scheduled a preliminary picture day. This is how I ended up that day (picture) and this is a collage of what we ended up with. (picture) .

So as you can see, I had lots of facial hair, and it was way gray. Toward the end, I was trying to decide how to sculpt it when someone suggested that I could pull off the "Lincoln look" - full beard, no moustache. I thought about it and said what the heck. So, the last day of January, I shaved off the moustache and went to work like this (picture) of this (picture). It was kind of fun, though a lot of people thought I was trying for the Amish look and called my Jebedia, which of course morphed into "Drubediah". Anyway, we took some silly pictures and that was supposed to be the end of it. However, when I was preparing to shave it off the next morning, I realized that Lincoln's Birthday was coming up in less than two weeks so I kept it. I started letting the moustache grow back in though while I was waiting and everyone thought I was just going back to the full hair face look. Meanwhile, I found a costume store that was going out of business and got the long coat and the top hat and the bow tie. I did not wear it on Lincoln's Birthday, which was actually a tuesday, but instead I wore it on Wednesday, the day afterward, since we had a lot more people scheduled to work that day (and I was only going to wear it once). Only one person at work knew what I was up to and I came in as Drubraham Lincoln.and had fun all day. People were constantly coming past my cubicle to see me and I had to constantly put the coat and hat back on and parade around like a runway model, but like I said, it was fun. I guess I didn't know that I am a latent exhibitionist!

Then while at home, I got my eldest son to take these pictures to preserve the moment. I might try it again next year. But if I do, I will highly consider doing one thing different. I didn't realize that if I held onto the beard for yet another month, I could also have celebrated St Patrick's day with it. How do you think it would look with a green bowler hat, a green wig and dying the beard green to match? Probably a little like this (picture). I would probably be the tallest leprechaun around, but it might turn out alright. We will have to see how it works out next year.

Getting silly

This one is the one from the left just cropped a little