When I was a kid my dad and I always watched Wednesday night boxing on television.  Every week an announcer from the Gillett company told us about some tremendous new breakthrough in shaving science.  The space race was going on back then.  But it just crawled along compared with shaving.  Advances in space took months or even years, while there was a new discovery in shaving science every Wednesday night.  I just figured shaving scientists were smarter than rocket scientists.

    When I was eight, dad bought me a razor of my own, at the dime store.  It was plastic with cardboard blades.  Those cardboard blades didn’t last very long, so in my early twenties I had to by my first real razor. 

    It was a Track Two, with two blades, both shaving you at the same time.  The first blade pulled the hair away from your face while the second blade cut it off neatly below the skin line.  That sounded a lot like trying to mow grass below the dirt line, but Gillett spent a billion dollars or so on advertising, with scientific looking drawings.  So I bought one.  I also bought some extra blades.

    Shave cream was easy.  I bought Noxzema.  Sure, Noxzema sounded like a skin disease, but Barbara Feldon did these sexy commercials on television, purring, "Take it off.  Take it all off with Noxzema."  So I bought a can.

    My first shave went great.  The surgeon later told me it was the best amateur tracheotomy he'd ever seen.  But it was a close shave. 

    My beard was pretty light, so those extra blades I bought lasted forever.  In fact the first thing to wear out was the handle part of the razor.  There was this little metal flange that held the blades to the handle.  The flange came loose.  For a long time I held it in place with my thumb, but that didn't look cool, so I went shopping for a new handle. 

    That’s when I learned The First Rule of Shaving:  "They don’t sell just handles." You have to buy a whole new razor with more blades.  The Second Rule of Shaving turned out to be, "They don’t make the kind of handle or blades you have anymore." 

    I had about a dozen blades left, and with my beard they would easily last into the next decade. So I continued holding that little flange in place with my thumb and kept trying to buy a handle. . .  until one day, I found a one piece razor called a, Bic Disposable.  It seemed like a waste to throw away an entire razor when the blade wore out, but I figured, If I could pry the disposable handle part off the disposable blade part, the handle just might fit my old Track Two blades.  And you know what?  It worked.  At least it did until the handle wore thin and the blade started wiggling.  This seemed pretty dangerous.  I tried gluing a blade on the handle, but it only lasted for half a shave. 

    My next razor was high tech.  It had little pushbutton pinchers that held a blade cartridge in place.  But those pinchers were loose and the blades swiveled.  If I had wanted swiveling blades I could still be using my old blades and the broken handle.  Then I heard an announcer on television explained that these new blades were supposed to swivel, "to follow the contours of your beard, noticeably reducing nicks and cuts."

    Boy those shaving scientists were smart.  It turned out, according to them, that these loose, randomly wiggling blades were far safer than those firmly attached blades that I had carefully controlled with precise fingertip pressure for all those years.

    I used that swivel headed razor until I couldn’t find anymore blades (see the Second Rule of Shaving).  I really didn’t mind giving it up though.  Although my plastic surgeon hated to sell his beach house. 

    After that I tried several shaving systems (they had quit calling them razors by then), I learned The Third Rule of Shaving:  "They quit making your shaving system the second you buy one." 

    The rocket scientists finally made it to the moon, but the shaving scientists are still way out ahead.  By this time they have created hundreds of ways for blades to attach to handles (magnets, Velcro, wing nuts, rubber bands) and hundreds of other ways for the handles to attach to blades.  Do that, today, no handle actually fits any blade.  This is basically the same idea that drives the ball point pen refill industry. 

    The Fourth Rule of Shaving: "You might as well buy a disposable razor, because they are all disposable."

    There is also a Fifth Rule of Shaving, which is:  "They just make this stuff up to sell more razors."  It turns out, according to snatches of testimony I read in transcripts of the Michael Jackson trial, that there never really were any shaving scientists.  It was just a bunch of advertising people who came up with all of that technology.  Thinking back on it, the space program could have used some of those advertising people.  We would have probably gotten to the moon a lot faster.

    Lately I’ve been thinking about going back to cardboard blades.  But don’t worry Barbara, I’ll still use Noxzema.