I once worked as a social worker in the Bronx and one of my coworkers was a youngish female of Cubano-Puertoriqueno origins with a soft delicate black moustache.
Her facial fur was not a topic of conversation.
The eight or nine guys in the office who hovered around her desk instead of around their own, preventing her from getting work done, THAT was a topic of conversation.
From our somewhat mean-spirited social work supervisor’s perspective, her tendency to get distracted by male attentions, in or outside the office, and perhaps to encourage same, and to use same to shift attention from how well she was or wasn’t doing her job…THAT was a topic of conversation.
I was a person of sufficient decorum and dignity to avoid draping myself across the top of her cubicle-divider without a good excuse ::did I say that?:: um, reason, I meant. Because our caseloads intersected, it was nevertheless necessary for me to consult with her fairly often. I had probably spoken with her 9 or 10 dozen times, and looked at her (with varying degrees of intensity and duration) throughout, before the meticulous documentarian in the back of my mind noted, “Hmm, how interesting, she actually kind of has a moustache, look at that, I mean if it were anyone other than her you would say she had a moustache…hmm, so why isn’t it one?”
The soft and delicate and innocuous hairs growing from the skin above her lip had probably never been shaven; it was hard to imagine that that skin had ever been subjected to the indignity of razor, nor that the gentle and almost frilly little hairs themselves had ever been reduced to stubble. The medium-dark glowing Hispanic mahogany skin reduced it to the impact of the cutest of peach fuzz, and it just sort of blended into the total picture.
There wasn’t a straight guy present, including the 78 year old van driver, who didn’t want to say hello and chat. There were even straight women and gay guys who had the hots for her, if only in the most sexually unconscious of ways.
