They just built a new shopping center down the street from our house. With the exception of the supermarket, the stories are still vacant, or so we thought. With the boys in tow, at the mouth of the supermarket, a man walks up with flyer and says, ‘The barbershop around the corner opened today and they are giving free haircuts’. Since the boys looked like little British kids with uneven hair and, in Rick’s case, pasty skin, we finished shopping, dropped the bags in the car, and went for haircuts.

          Gotta give this place some love right up front. It’s called Fade County. Look them up on Twitter @FadeCounty. All the barbers were guys, less the stylists of Jose Eber ilk and more like graffiti artists tagging your head with perfectly straight lines and sharp corners. There was a lot of hand shaking and chest bumping. With our three year old in the chair, the barber cracked just enough of a smile to show that he was friendly without breaking his masculine demeanor and shaved Ricky clean. Even with the moving target of a three-year-old’s head, this guy did not break a sweat and Rick’s head couldn’t be more precisely edged even if the barber used a t-square.

           In the other chair, Bobby, the six-year-old, decides that he wants a Mohawk. We have an opinion in our family kids should be able to express themselves, as long as it is not permanent and won’t get them in trouble at school. It’s a haircut, not a tattoo and school is out, so…. ‘The boy wants a Mohawk, give the boy a Mohawk’.

          Summer is the perfect time to let go and have some fun. It’s also a good time to let the kids experiment with being something a little different from their normal ‘school self’. We all know the value of a good haircut. Every woman knows that, if she wants to make a change, she just needs to change her hair. Every guy with male pattern baldness knows how right it feels to go from bald to well groomed. And we’re old and jaded.

          Kids get to test and research who they want to be on a day to day bases and summer is the best time to do it. So we say, ‘funny haircuts for everyone’.

          By the way, Bobby looks like a shark and wants everyone to see him. Ricky looks more like a shaved peach and is enjoying people kissing his head.