And so The Itchy and Scratchy Show goes on for at least another week. The Eagles playoff victory over the New York Giants today guarantees that I will be both uncomfortable and unsightly at least until next weekend, pending the outcome of the NFC Championship game between the Eagles and Cardinals. At least until then, and possibly longer, I will be wearing my Eagles victory beard, as shaggy a shaggy dog story about this football season as ever there was to tell. Or as Fox NFL pregame court jester Frank Caliendo (playing Tony Soprano) said before kickoff yesterday, “Did you notice that Andy Reid is growing a beard on one of his chins?” I first noticed the reddish stubble on Reid’s chinny-chin-chins during that unbelievable Sunday when the Eagles came back from a fourth-and-fuhgeddaboutit chance to make the playoffs and then proceeded to blow out the Cowboys. It was during the fourth quarter of that sweet stomping of Dallas that I declared (unfortunately in front of witnesses at a Grays Ferry bar called the Krunch Inn), “I’m not going to shave until the Eagles lose.”

Growing a beard is a rite of passage that most guys go through at least once in their lives. Usually with disappointment the first time out in their late teens or early 20’s. There are those “patches” issues to contend with. That’s where the first-time beard grows luxuriantly in certain places and barely at all in others. The net effect is that the young man’s beard comes in looking like a dogleg par four complete with sand traps on the back nine at Cobbs Creek. That’s when he discovers that mom’s mascara isn’t just for girls anymore. It’s the beard equivalent of a comb over and it fools no one. In later years, say in his early 40’s, a man who decides to grow a beard discovers to his amusement that gray hair shows up in his face hair before his head hair. This gives him his first taste of youthful salt-and-pepper maturity, which gets old real quick. And then there is the man of a certain age, say a man of about my age, who when he decides to grow a victory beard to support his team in the NFL playoffs, learns that his formerly salt and pepper beard is now nothing but a foaming white sea with occasional lonely dark flecks resembling lifeboats after a ship wreck.

This is the beard I see when I look in the mirror. It makes me look like a hobo hunched over a gurgling crackling cauldron in some train yard. The only thing worse than how it looks is how it feels. What is it that makes me think that wearing such a hideous hood ornament will help the Eagles win a Superbowl? What do I know that Andy Reid doesn’t? Apparently not a gosh darn thing.

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