How my #noshavenovember almost went up in flames!

Well, I’ve been enjoying #NoShaveNovember  – knowing that my crazy fuzzy face is just for fun, and today, I celebrated by giving myself a nice trim, and my wife is very happy. She too was apparently celebrating #noshavenovember – I think to make a point to me…. 

On Sunday afternoon, though, the last day in November, I almost lost my beard in a blaze of glory!

I produce the media for Open Arms Community Church in Bradford and Port Allegany, PA.

This Christmas, we’re going to do a series of talks entitled “A K.I.S.S. Christmas – Keep It Simple Stupid” – and we decided to have a little fun with it – and make some parody-laden references to the rock band Kiss.

So on Sunday afternoon, we were shooting a crazy video where a band of KISS impersonators are faced with the complexities of Christmas traditions. It’s certainly not a quality video, and most of the humor is funny if you attend our church and know the band members and the kids in the video. But it was FUN.

Our Gene Simmons stand-in offered to spit fire. And I thought – WHOAH! That would be SO COOL!

So here’s the scene – little kids waiting to see Santa are shocked when Santa is Gene Simmons in a santa hat. He spits fire in the air and they run away screaming.

The kids are on my right, and the band is on my left.

“Gene”  fills his mouth full of lighter fluid, douses the hilt of a sword, and lights it on fire. Then he spits the fluid on the flame, sending a glorious fireball about twelve feet in the air.

But instead of burning up in the air – the flaming lighter fluid descended in a ring of fire around me. There was fire all around me on the ground, a flame on my hat, and flame on my camera, and the smell of singed facial hair – all accompanied by the screams of little kids!

Of course, we got all the fire out in just seconds, and the whole incident was probably not more than ten seconds. But it was just long enough to increase my heart rate, and curl the ends of my beard!

The video gets released on Sunday – so maybe I’ll add it to the end of the post next week!