In Wilmore, the town where I went to first grade and college, there is a barber shop named Clay’s. Clay has cut hair there for almost sixty years. He will utter the ancient incantation, “blocked or tapered in the back?”, he’ll will listen politely while you tell him what kind of hair cut you want, and then he’ll give you the same haircut that he’s given every man who’s come into his store since 1950.

In Wilmore, there are also hairdressers. Scads of them. Possibly one for every ten citizens of the town. It’s always been a marvel to me that they stay in business.

Here in Lexington, I can’t find a barber shop, of any description, without driving for fifteen minutes. There are hair dressers. Plenty of them. But I realized this morning, as I approach the time when I can no longer avoid a hair cut any longer, that I have never, not even once, seen a man in the hair dressers that I’ve gone to around here. And the amount of goop that gets glopped into my hair when I go there makes me wonder whether they have, in fact, ever cut a man’s hair.

I am *so* tired of going for a simple hair cut, and having some beauty-school graduate think I also want my eyebrows trimmed, and possibly highlights and a perm. And don’t even get me started on what they try to do to my beard.

Which all leads me to wonder, where do men around here go for their hair cuts? Maybe I just need to start taking the trek across town to the “Old Fashioned Barber Shop.” But why is it old fashioned? Doesn’t any man just want a hair cut these days?

UPDATE: Awesome related article: Barber Shops