I’m guessing that Paul Lundgren will produce evidence proving my timeline wrong, but I’m still going to give you my version of the history of Homegrown’s Sharpie mustaches.

May 5, 2006, RT Quinlan’s: Max Blast comes in to introduce Bone Appetite, wearing a powder-blue suit and sporting a thin, black mustache. I am impressed. [I might be making this part up, but] Patrick Nelson grabs a Sharpie and draws his own mustache on. I am even more impressed. Bone Appetite plays their last show ever.

May 4, 2007, Shaky Ray: Hotrod, Whittier and I are sitting around the Shaky Ray’s kitchen table, drinking some early-day beers. Whittier disappears upstairs and returns with a Sharpie mustache; Hotrod and I rapidly follow suit. We then meet up with many other people (including: Rich Narum, Brad Nelson, SuddendEATh and Richie Gunns) at Luce and laugh as people react to soiled underwear on the sidewalk. Being a dumbass, I have a Sharpie with me, and soon everyone has a mustache.

May 5, 2007, Kickball and post-party: Things get out of control, and there are far more mustaches applied. Someone else will, no doubt, supply the pictures.

Homegrown 2008-09: Mustaches abound, and the practice spreads to include people I’ve never met. [Or, to be more precise: People I’ve never met and I’ve never drawn on.] And yet, 2009 is a mustache-free zone, at least for myself. This is partially driven by having my picture on the front page of the DNT (below the fold). Yeah, none of this makes sense to me either.

May 8, 2010, Kickball game: My Sharpie mustache returns, courtesy Rich Narum.

May 8, 2010, some bar: Hotrod is accosted by some drunk college kid because he doesn’t have a Sharpie mustache. The sot explains that this is a Homegrown tradition, and that Hotrod is ruining Homegrown by not participating. Obliviousness; always entertaining.

Thus concludes our lesson.