That's Neither Hair nor There

There's a barber shop in our neighborhood, owned by a neighborhood resident and fitted with grand old barbershop chairs, the kind that have an ornate metal footplate.

It also shows art on its walls and has a nails table.

I wanted to make an appointment there for a haircut, so I looked in the yellow pages, first under "Hair." O, the world is not that simple. I was directed either from "Hair Cutting" to "Haircutters & Stylists" or from "Hair Dressing" to "Beauty Salons."

Oddly, there are fewer than 2 dozen entries under "Haircutters & Stylists." It must be too straightforward. Or maybe too dissonant: if you just want a cut, you don't care about style.

Where does the term "hairdresser" come from? Who still uses it? I turned to "Beauty Salons." I didn't find what I was looking for.

Could it be, that in spite of its art gallery pretensions, its fingernail attentions, and, on top of it all, its female-turned-male one-who-cuts-hair named Cupid, our local facility is actually a Barber Shop?

It does, in fact, have "Barber Shop" in its name. I don't know why I was surprised to find it under that yellow pages heading.

My husband--he goes to a barber shop. It has one chair and one old Mr. G- with a pair of scissors and a razor. It's filled with plants and old men watching Godzilla movies. I've never been in; I doubt Mr. G- has cut a woman's head of hair in the past 20 years, if ever. Mr. G- charges $5 for a cut and used to try to give my husband the student rate of $4. Now that's a barber shop.