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I got so psyched by yesterday's entry that I decided to put my money where my pie-hole is and actually shave like Lee Marvin would. That is, if Lee Marvin was presented with the scenario of cobbling together a shaving rig from my bottomless dresser drawer full of shaving crap. I've got creams, soaps, razors, blades, aftershaves, balms, brushes, and all kinds of assorted shave-related poultices crammed into a dresser drawer in my home office, ranging from the embarrassingly luxurious to the likes of which a hobo might get by on.

Were Lee Marvin to poke around in my shaving drawer, I think he'd grab for the most no-nonsense gear in the scrum. No rose scented shaving creams. No $120 Merkur Vision razor that comes in a presentation case for cripes sake. In fact, no adjustable razor of any kind -- leave that fancy stuff to the pretty boys eating salads on their lunch break at the florist.

I figured my trusty Merkur HD was Lee-Approved -- it's Heavy Duty after all, and it's the most rock-solid, no-nonsense DE razor I know of. Lee might've shaved with a straight razor -- probably did it in the dark, on a dry face, waiting outside Marvin Michelson's office so he could pound the crap out of him -- but I've put mine away for the time being. I feel pretty good that Lee would've been into the Merkur HD. It's the kind of razor you can huck at a guy's head, like Marvin Michelson's for instance, knock him out cold, pick up the razor, and catch a shave from it without missing a beat. Try that with a Flicker sometime.

For the lube, I did something I haven't done in a long time, but I think it's what Lee would've done. I used a hard shaving soap. Taylor's Sandalwood. If there's a manlier smelling hard shave soap out there -- not that Lee would've given a rat's ass what it smelled like -- look, forget the question, there isn't a manlier smelling soap out there. Sandalwood is the manly smell. What's that, you say? Musk is manlier? Let me tell you something -- if you need to spray some fake musk on in order to give off a masculine spoor, just cut to the chase and be this guy, okay?

Hard shave soap is literally a round cake of hard soap, in a wooden bowl. The concept is as old as the hills -- the first hominids who shaved in a recognizably civilized manner lathered from a bar of hard soap. You can use pretty much any soap you can find, but the traditional English firms who make the best creams seem to know a thing or two about making the right kind of hard shaving soaps, so I went with Taylor.

I don't normally use hard soaps because while they do let you shave a weensy bit closer than a good cream, they don't lube nearly as well, and I always seem to shave too close and irritate the hell out of my skin, especially around my neck. Years ago, when I first began trying different products to get a better shave than what I'd been getting from a Mach3 and goo-inna-can, I got ahold of some hard shaving soap from Art Of Shaving. Lavender, I think it was. I got a closer shave, definitely, but it beat up my neck and left red marks all around my Adam's apple.

I went on to try all kinds of other hard soaps, even some pricey Creed stuff my beloved wife bought me, but I could never shave with any of them without irritation. They all worked much better than modern gels or foams, but once I tried the high-quality creams from Trumper, Taylor and Proraso, I've never looked back. On my face, there's no comparison -- a good cream is miles ahead of any hard soap I've ever tried when it comes to lubing your face and protecting it from nicks and irritation.

But this morning I was on mission to shave like Lee Marvin, so I got out the Sandalwood hard soap and went to town. Soaked my brush in hot water in the sink and swirled it around on the soap till I got a thick head of lather, and then painted my face white. I have to say, Taylor's Sandalwood hard soap smells fantastic -- it's what I wished I smelled like naturally, instead of a zoo's monkey house. Lee Marvin probably smelled like gunpowder and cheap gin from an old Army canteen. Lee Marvin probably didn't muse on what other men smelled like, though.

The thing about hard shave soap is, it starts out fine. But as soon as you shave a swath down your cheek, don't even think about going over that patch again without relathering it, because it'll be just like you're shaving on dry skin. For some reason, the better creams like Taylor and Proraso let me go over the same area a few times with the DE, and my skin is still fairly slick throughout. Not so with the hard soaps. Maybe that's a good thing for some guys and the way they shave. Not for me.

I shaved in the usual way, with my usual razor, and got a very good shave overall. But -- and this is my universal but when it comes to hard soaps, no matter the brand -- I was left with red marks on my neck, and my face felt significantly more raw than usual. I wouldn't call it out-and-out razor burn, but I was definitely feeling a bit of heat. I never feel even a hint of heat after I shave with Taylor's shaving creams, or Trumper's, or especially Proraso -- my face feels so great after I shave with a good cream that I kick myself on a daily basis for not knowing about this stuff twenty years ago.

So I'm not Lee Marvin after all. Like I needed to shave with a hard soap to learn this, right?