One of my favorite episodes of Sealab involves a scene where a mustache clad Captain Murphy is disrobing to nightgown clad Debbie (and later Buckethead Wendy) in a bedroom. Murphy asks “Stache on or off?” to which Debbie replies “off please.” Murphy issues a stern response befitting those who have known the power of a mustache. “Too bad.”
I don’t know why we did it exactly. It started at a show at Star Central years earlier where Mike’s mom was forcing him to shave his beard before his wedding. In the process of shaving, Mike shaved the beard off first, but when he got to the mustache, realizing there was a show that night, he left it on and dyed it jet black. Not telling anyone, we showed up to the practice space, and nearly died laughing. It was beautiful.
Years later, I decided I wanted to recreate this horrible incident, and shaved my beard to a mustache for a show at the Garage. Perhaps it was in desire to be the pervert trucker around an all ages show. Truthfully, all I remember is Julie showing up to the show, chatting with me, and in mid-sentence, just started laughing, saying “I just noticed the mustache.”
And for whatever reason, I don’t even know how we came to it, we decided to do the mustache show for Brian Huebner’s birthday show. There was no correlation, no special event. Just a celebration of upper lipped facial hair. It took Jake two months of preparation to get his facial hair even to the point where a mustache was going to happen. But, we went ahead and did it.
The best part was this show took place after the Funeral For a Friend show. We received a variety of looks from their fans. Some were actually rude enough to point and whisper. My favorite is when somebody stared for too long, and then deliberately looked away as if to pretend nothing unusual was going on. Occasionally, somebody recognized the virtue of the stache and complimented us.
It was our first show with Under Eden, which is somewhat surprising considering the similarity in our music and how long both of us have been around, and it was also a return gig with our friends and spacemates in Risingfall. It was also nice to play a show at Station 4 with reasonably inclement conditions, as opposed to blinding storms of frost and cold snaps.
Congratulations to Brian for surviving another revolution of the earth around our sun, and his upcoming parenthood as well! We are working out the details of our next show, and hope to have it posted shortly!
- Neil
