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The other morning, as I patted some of the froth under my nose
and at each sideburn, I found myself humming. Not recognizing the tune, I
smoothed wide stripes of white lather on my cheeks until the words came back.
"No brush,
No lather,
No rub-in.
Wet your razor,
Then begin.
Barbasol. Bar-ba-sol!"
My singing wasn’t right. Although I thought I had the words correct, the voice
that made that song immortal was a gravelly, growly bass, with lots of resonance
on the higher notes. Ed - - Ed something or other - - was the singer.
Barbasol was one of the first brushless shaving creams. Maybe, the first. It was
some sort of gel in a tube. Not as it is today, lather in a spray can. Not a
round cake that just filled the bottom of a shaving mug, as it must once have
been. As Ed sang, “No brush, no lather, no rub-in” was needed with that gel.
And we all thought it progress.
How many times have I changed the way I remove facial hair in the name of
progress?
I began with a Gillette safety razor, a coffee cup for lather and an old shaving
brush from my father.
I still think a brush drawing a line of suds across one’s upper lip is one of
the sensual delights of all ages.
With a lathered brush you could try changed appearances: How would you look with
a R.E. Lee white beard? With a Burnside sideburn? If the lather was thick enough
you could attempt a mustache zareba such as French Premier Georges Clemenceau
sputtered through in movie News Reels. Scenes in which he usually denounced the
League of Nations.
As the soap dried on my face, I drifted through memories of years of shaving:
No brush. Nothing else was ever so soft and yielding to one’s every whim. I
discarded the shaving brush while in college.
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