THE NEW ME

The New Year requires a new me, so I decided to go off to the barbershop and get a haircut. There are two things I hate to do and they are: dentists and haircuts.

Entering the barbershop I see two new barbers, and the picture seems kind of odd. Cutting a man’s hair in one of the three barber chairs is a short round man and a woman who is sweeping the floor. Both are wearing black smocks!

“You give haircuts here?” I ask.

The New Prettier Me

The lady pausing: sweeps one hand toward the chairs and says: “Yes!”

The Old Me

The guy in the chair is smiling while looking at me, and the barber who also paused at the question points at one of the chairs and says: Yes! Yes! Come on in!” He finishes off the customer and points to the next empty chair where he will cut my hair. 

Sitting in the chair, he puts the cover over me and gets real close, eyeball-to-eyeball and asks: “Are you comfortable?” I respond: “I make a nice living.”

The lady, who I now suspect may be part of a husband and wife team stops sweeping the floor and sits down in the barber chair next to mine. I hear the snipping of the scissor in my ear, and an uncomfortable feeling that I am being watched. I sneak a peak into the large wall mirror and catch a glimpse of Mrs. Scissorhands staring intently at me! I try to not notice, but it IS killing me.

Chopping away with precision and confidence, Dr. Scissorhands continues, having difficulty maneuvering around my head because he is so short. I get this feeling that between the two of them I am in some kind of black comedy, even if it IS a haircut I’m getting.

Pointing to my beard he asks if I want him to trim it and then asks about my eyebrows and goes ahead and trims away, taking great care, going after single hairs on my head, and even in my ears. Actually, I shouldn’t let him cut those ear hairs since I want to use them for a potential rake over some day.

And so we come down to the final clips and combs, the stepping back and away to analyze his work, Dr. Scissorhands takes out the mirror and shows me his masterpiece. Overcome by the beauty of what I see, I completely miss the haircut he did, while stating: “WOW! How beautiful!” (That happens a lot!)

Mrs. Scissorhands then begins to question me: “You like the haircut?”

“Yes!”

“Not too short?”

“No!”

“Not too long?”

“No.”

“Just right?”

I pause to weight my response, since I exhausted two options, I didn’t want to be contradictory: “Yes! I guess it IS just right!”

“Good! Come back soon?”

“Well, let’s wait ‘til this one grows out first.”