BARELY SHAVERS.(The Talk of the Town)(Moustaches for Kids contest)

It is probably a good sign for the mustache in America that the biennial World Beard and Moustache Championships, after being held in the Northern European towns of Hofen/Enz, Pforzheim, Trondheim, and Schomberg, came this past November to Carson City, Nevada. Since the early seventies, the mustache, despite some memorable specimens (Rollie Fingers, Tom Selleck, Ned Flanders) and die-hard constituencies (cops, professional bowlers, Playgirl pinups), has failed to match the mainstream popularity of its questionable cousin the goatee. It's hard, certainly, to imagine an American President sporting a soup-strainer like Vaclav Havel's.

Still, there have been glimmers of a mustache revival. When a model named Eugene Hutz appeared in a fashion show, in the summer of 1999, wearing the drooping accordion player's mustache of his native Ukraine, he inspired a flurry of mustache coverage. "It's not every day you see Snidely Whiplash on a runway," the Times observed.

Which brings us to a windblown stretch of Williamsburg the other night, where the Pirate, an earnest young man with an earnest young mustache, was standing in front of a shuttered bar--the official site of the finals of the Mustaches for Kids mustache-growing contest. "The bar had its liquor license confiscated today, and no one told us," the Pirate, one of the contest's organizers, explained bitterly, shivering in his Hawaiian shirt, jeans, and running shoes. He pointed off into the darkness, in the direction of the Alligator Lounge, where the contest had established provisional quarters.

Mustaches for Kids got its start in Los Angeles in 1999, when two guys named Big Al and Dan Strange decided to bet on who could grow the best mustache in a month. Soon, their wager grew into an organized competition for charity. Contestants line up sponsors, who pledge money to the Make-A-Wish Foundation, the idea being that it is as hard to cultivate a mustache for four weeks as it is to run a marathon, or perhaps a 10K.

Although the official ...