Did Grizzly Adams ever get any play?

Guys will compete with each other over anything. This quirk of the male character never ceases to amaze me or crack me up.

The scene: Boston, April 2001. The place: Applebee's. I was out to lunch with four of my male coworkers. Two of them - we'll call them Ted and Bob - were getting a little, shall we say, "scruffy". I don't mean growing-out-a-beard scruffy; I'm talking about unkempt-mountain-man-who-hasn't-seen-a-woman-in-about-a-decade scruffy. Untrimmed, ungroomed, unclean. Bob's beard was starting to resemble a collection of little dreds. On a skinny white dude, this is not a good look. Now, it's not unusual for guys who live in cold climates to grow a beard in the wintertime, but it was spring; the weather was getting warmer by the day, as the hair growing out of Tim and Bob's faces got more and more grizzly.

"Aren't you guys hot under all that hair?" I had to ask. "What gives with the cave dweller look?"

Ted and Bob looked at each other and shared the conspiratorial "huh-huh, huhuhuh" laugh that guys have when they're doing something just to see what happens.

"We've decided to see how long we can grow our beards before they drive us crazy and we have to chop them off," said Ted. "We're trying to see who can go longest before shaving." Bob nodded his head in assent.

"Oh, I get it," I said amiably. "You're competing to see who can go the longest without getting laid."

Silence from all four guys. Then: uproarious laughter all around. "Uh, dude," said Bob, "we might want to rethink this."

Indeed.