This Movember—that global event each November where men grow out the facial hair above their upper lip to raise money and awareness for men’s health matters—a brow-raising book of short stories arrived in Daily Nutmeg’s inbox: Sporting Moustaches by Stratford resident Aug Stone, with illustrations by Allen Crawford.
Before going any further, we must first establish some important style preferences employed by the author:
1. As the title indicates, Stone uses “moustache,” not the more commonly used “mustache.”
2. His preferred shorthand is “tasche,” not the generally favored “stache.”
I’ll be deferring to those choices here, not just for consistency’s sake but also to help convey the off-kilter, old-timey and, yes, shaggy tone of Stone’s stories—13 “tall tales” featuring men with epic facial hair pursuing unlikely excellence across an array of different sports and games, from hockey to badminton to quirkier arenas still.
Stone’s zany fictional characters include Ustin Zamok, a chess champion who uses his waxed tasche to convey pieces around the board (“Black & White & Red All Over); Puffy Pullman and Cheeks Redborne, teenage souses who tie their tasches together and challenge the local three-legged race champions to a three-faced race (“An Early History of the Three-Faced Race”); and Hans Freeman, who, true to his name, becomes the world’s greatest air hockey player by grasping the striker with only the hair of his goatee (“Pigheaded”).
In “Putting the Ache in Moustache,” a barber named Edward van der Haar finds his business—To Shave & To Hold—at the center of a border disagreement between the towns of Arnhem and Zeeland. To settle the dispute, van der Haar stages a tug of war. “And not just any tug of war,” Stone writes. “Eight men from each municipality would wind their moustaches—all of which van der Haar had lovingly tended to over the years—into the competition rope. The winning team would then lay claim to van der Haar’s business. The losers would be shaven clean.” And where would this contest take place? At Van Dyke Park, of course—a reference to a particularly cheeky style of beard.
Such is the density of wordplay Stone employs to keep readers delighted and surprised. His approach prompts thoughts of Nikolai Gogol’s absurdist short story “The Nose,” while his sly nods to cultural touchstones as varied as Back to the Future and Bela Lugosi add modernist ridiculousness in the best of ways.
In Sporting Moustaches, there are no appearances from famously moustachioed real-life athletes like Rollie Fingers, Mike Ditka or Dale Earnhardt Sr. (though in “Cracking Up,” a story about a figure skating dynamo so furry as to be “bear-like,” the mention of an Austrian town called Spitz made this reader think of Olympic champion Mark Spitz’s famously hairy upper lip; maybe that was the point). But the creative athleticism required to knit together this many hirsute sports yarns would have made them proud.
Written by Daniel Fleschner. Aug Stone is scheduled to appear at a 1 p.m. book signing Saturday, November 16, at Guilford’s Breakwater Books and a 4 p.m. book reading Sunday, November 17, at Wallingford’s Hidden Gem on Main.
