{"id":45040,"date":"2019-03-21T03:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-03-21T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/calling-all-beardos-theres-a-new-club-just-for-you\/"},"modified":"2019-03-21T13:18:19","modified_gmt":"2019-03-21T21:18:19","slug":"calling-all-beardos-theres-a-new-club-just-for-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/calling-all-beardos-theres-a-new-club-just-for-you\/","title":{"rendered":"Calling all beardos: There&#8217;s a new club just for you"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Matt Walker was struck by how many fuzzy faces he saw in Juneau this past winter.<\/p>\n<p>The Maryland transplant has been living in Juneau for about a year and a half. He works at Juneau Radio Center and said observing a steady stream of guests with facial follicles led him to consider starting what he&rsquo;s tentatively calling Juneau Beard Club, which is poised to have its first meeting Tuesday.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;Over the winter it kind of hit me that it&rsquo;d be something fun to do,&rdquo; Walker said during an interview with the Capital City Weekly. &ldquo;I got the itch to be involved in a beard club again.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>Walker, who sports a ZZ Top-esque beard that&rsquo;s been present in one form or another since about 2002, was previously a member of a beard club in the Lower 48.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/plugins\/post.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fpermalink.php%3Fstory_fbid%3D314758265846906%26id%3D314757692513630%26substory_index%3D0&#038;width=500\" width=\"500\" height=\"529\" style=\"border:none;overflow:hidden\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" allowTransparency=\"true\" allow=\"encrypted-media\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>He asked around about already existing clubs, but found no leads. Google, Twitter and Facebook yielded no local responses either, so Walker is spearheading a Juneau club that will be wide open to any person over the age of 21 regardless of their facial hair status.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;Anybody can come,&rdquo; Walker said. &ldquo;One of my big things is community, forging community and hanging out with people. Any time you can bring people together with a common interest, it&rsquo;s good.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>The club&rsquo;s openness to potential members without beards from across the gender spectrum is also partially a reflection of the competitive facial hair scene. In the past, Walker has competed in the beards over 12 inches in length category.<\/p>\n<p>In the past, he&rsquo;s competed in Weird Out with Your Beard Out, Beards Without Borders, Bearding Man and Folkin&rsquo; Facial Hair Festival.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;There&rsquo;s different categories as far as length of beard, color of beard, style of beard,&rdquo; Walker said. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s even a female division called the <a href=\"http:\/\/sheamagazine.com\/lovely-ladies-of-bearding-the-whiskerinas\/\" target=\"_blank\">Whiskerinas<\/a>.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p><ins>[<a href=\"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/turning-trash-to-treasure-new-event-includes-art-show-and-building-contest-using-collected-scrap\/\" target=\"_blank\">Assemblage art contest tasks teams with turning trash into art<\/a>]<\/ins><\/p>\n<p>That last division applies to women who create costume beards, he said.<\/p>\n<p>He said he was unaware of any Southeast Alaska-specific contests, but was aware of one in Anchorage, which was also the site of the 2009 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.worldbeardchampionships.com\/history\" target=\"_blank\">World Beard and Moustache Championships.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Walker said his hopes for the fledgling club are based on his experiences in past beard clubs that functioned as both social and service organizations.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;I hope it creates a community, where we can say we have some manpower and can help with some stuff, and we can have a core group that says, &lsquo;Hey we want to raise some money for some passion projects,&rsquo;&rdquo; Walker said. &ldquo;Even if it&rsquo;s a few hundred dollars, it&rsquo;s worth it. It&rsquo;s got the community aspect where it&rsquo;s social, but at the same time, it&rsquo;s using that group to go forward and do things for the community as well.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p><ins>[<a href=\"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/movie-night-moves-suicide-into-public-focus\/\" target=\"_blank\">Juneau Suicide Prevention Coalition moves mental wellness discussion to public venues<\/a>]<\/ins><\/p>\n<p>Right now, Walker is unsure who will show up or how many beard-lovers and beard-lover-lovers might be in attendance for the meeting 6 p.m. Tuesday, March 26 at the Red Dog Saloon. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/events\/381972805720518\/\" target=\"_blank\">An event page on Facebook<\/a> showed seven people as definitely going and 43 people interested as of Wednesday morning.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s always tough in this town to get a full idea of who&rsquo;s going to show up,&rdquo; Walker said. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s what we&rsquo;re trying to do right now is create that (a core group of members.) If it works, it works and if not, at least we tried.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><b>\u2022 Contact arts and culture reporter Ben Hohenstatt at (907)523-2243 or bhohenstatt@juneauempire.com. Follow him on Twitter at @BenHohenstatt.<\/b><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A facial hair-brained idea is taking root. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":474,"featured_media":45041,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":9,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,4],"tags":[73],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-45040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-home","category-news","tag-ccw"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/474"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45040"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45040\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45040"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=45040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}