A boy, a Bic razor and a vision: No eyebrows!

I did a lot of stupid things as a kid for no real reason other than to get a laugh.  It was on one such occasion that I shaved my eyebrows completely off.  

Much has been said of that fateful day.  The story has become more myth than truth.  In fact, over the years the story has been mytholized, trivialized, exaggeratized and legendaryized.  All that remains are three tidbits of truth: a boy, a razor and the backseat of a Suburban.  

I was all of 14 years old and the hairs on my chin had just started hitting puberty.  They had begun to show their timid heads and my mom had purchased me a couple of Bic razors to take care of business.  I found that I now owned a small collection of all of Bic's products: both pens and razors!  Armed with a can of Arm and Hammer shaving cream, I was ready to become a man.  

I know what your thinking, and of course, real men do not shave off their eyebrows.  I didn't say I was a man, I just said that I was ready to become a man.  There was just one juvinile episode of tomfoolery that needed to be completed and that was the shaving of the eyebrows.

I had planned and coordinated my moves for weeks.  We would be traveling south to Moab as a scout troop that summer and it would not take the entire trip to whittle the old chin eye straps.  We gathered, said a prayer for our safety (on the trip, not from my parents when I got home) and I hopped in the tail end of that Mormon-obile.  

My friends knew exactly what I was up to and they huddled around me like I was passing out candy cigarettes.  I pulled out my trusty Bic, fresh from the plastic wrap and stared at it's gleaming blade.  The driver, oblivious to my malarky, drove like the wind to our destination.  I, on the other hand, had not considered the need for any sort of lubricating cream to soften the scraping of the cutlass against my tender, tender skin.  Without hesitation, I went forward with my plan of attack anyway.

My grossed out, circle posse began groaning and squealing as small chunks of fur fell from my feathered brow into a plastic ziplock bag.  Unable to bring the vehicle to a stop on a busy section of I-15, our leader started screaming and begging me to stop from the front seat of the car.  He was absolutely stupefied that something so inanely outlandish could be taking place in the back seat of his burban.  There was nothing he could do, however, and the wads of brown shag continued to fall into their plastic resting place.

It did not take long to realize that without a creaming agent I would be mixing blood and brow.  Small sores began to appear above my brow and I felt that I was replaying a portion of Pink Floyd's "The Wall" to near perfection.  Within ten minutes, I was hairless, smooth and a bit bloody.  My friends were in hysterics, laughing aloud as I sat with a smile on my face, completely content and imperious with my bag of brow bristle.

I know what you are thinking - What a lavish and dazzling end to that story - no doubt.  And yep, you would be correct; if I never had to return to the loving arms of a mother and father, which were of course, mortified and embarrassed.  And of course, their mortification and embarrassment would have normally faded soon enough, most likely after I passed the sacrament that first week back.  But as luck would have it and to my horror, there was something I had not considered when I packed that new yellow Bic into my sack that day: We were getting our family pictures taken in less than two weeks!  Oops.

I had long bangs back in 1990.  They were almost long enough to cover where my eyebrows should have been, but not quite.  I recall my father just shaking his head in frustration as the photographer moved me around to conceal my chagrining forehead.  He tried everything from moving my head in different angles to moving me completely out of the picture.  Alas, the photos were flashed and our family portrait forever frozen in time.  I was very lucky as a 6 year old Jordan made the most adorable pose you have ever seen and for the majority of people that looked at the picture, that was the first thing they noticed.  If you look just a little closer, however, you will see a boy with a missing eyebrow or two.  

This story now lives on in Yospe infamy.  It is stuck on the walls of our wall(s) of shame, forever captured by a photograph.  Fortunately my eyebrows have grown back.  Unfortunately, it is true what they say: Once you shave a spot, the hair will grow back longer and thicker.  That is why you should never shave the insides of your nose.

Also, please add this to my list of things I probably should have never blogged about but did anyway.