I could easily grow one. I just don't want to.

It all began so positively. I was standing in the elementary school boys' room with my friend Paul. We were in fifth grade, and had just attended a special class about puberty. All of the fifth grade boys had gathered in Mr. Price's class, and the girls had assembled in Mrs. Sonnenfeld's room, to be briefed about what to expect in the coming years; to understand that we weren't alone in experiencing this hormone tsunami.

Paul and I each pressed ourselves against our respective sinks, to enable us to gaze as closely as possible to the area above our upper lips.
"Oh, oh. I see something, " I yelled. My heart pounded. "Come here and look at this."
"You've got three, no four...no, six!" Paul confirmed.
"Six! I've got six mustache hairs. And I'm only eleven. I'm gonna have a Burt Reynolds mustache by next year. Yes!"

That day in 1974 was one of the most exhilarating of my young life. I discovered that I was destined to have facial hair options. I had always considered it extremely cool that my dad could grow mustaches, beards, sideburns and any combination of the three at any time. And now, so could I. All it would take to look like Mark Spitz or Ted Nugent or a motorcycle cop...was a mustache. The options were even more plentiful with a beard. I could resemble Mac Davis, any of the Beatles or a nineteenth century American president. The world was my hairy oyster (hmm...that's gross).

But let me get to the point—things didn't work out.

My first mustache foray occurred because my college girlfriend was infatuated with Magnum P.I., played by Tom Selleck. I decided to give it a shot. Maybe I'll never drive a red Ferrari or be strikingly handsome and fit, I reasoned, but Thomas Magnum and I can be brothers in the 'stache club. I was pretty excited to try it for the first time, but discovered that even after I hadn't shaven for two weeks, I could still identify and name each hair of my "almostache."

I waited another five years, and this time, embarked on a quest for the full Grizzly Adams beard. My wife and I traveled to Europe for a three-month stint; so, hey, what better time to grow a beard and get a perm? That's right, a perm. I had rationalized that, since we were budget traveling and I wouldn't be able to wash my hair every day, a bit of curl might hide the grease build-up.

All of our slides from our 1990 European odyssey show a normal-looking Terri, next to some smarmy dweeb with a grandma permanent and a patchy, swamp grass face mask. My beard looked like the aliens had carved crop circles out of my face to guide them to the oil reserves.

I shaved the beard off before we returned home. I also should have shaved my head.

I still get a wild hair to grow some wild hairs every once in a while.  I'll take a crack at a soul patch or a goatee, but nothing ever pans out. I suppose I'm forever doomed to maintain my membership in the "this is my only choice" society. If only I could shift some of my other body hair around to my face, sort of like a collagen-based Rubix Cube, I could look like one of the guys from ZZ Top.

I'd even settle for Geraldo Rivera.