And A Very Good Time Was Had By All.
Back when I was in college – and that’s way back! – I had the very good fortune to have Sid Dimond as one of my professors at Boston University. He taught a variety of courses at BU’s School of Public Relations and Communications, focusing mostly on radio and TV.
Sid was a writer and a damn good one, too. Before he landed at BU, he wrote scripts for a classic old radio show called Inner Sanctum. More than 60 years later, recordings of the show are still being sold on several web sites. Yeah … he was that good.
But this isn’t about Sid; it’s about his barber. I’m sorry to say I have long since forgotten the guy’s name, but he was a widower, as I recall, and getting on in years. Italian, with a lingering accent. The old guy was also an excellent cook.
And he had the most wonderful hobby, if that’s what you call it. Every couple of months he would invite three of four people up to his simple apartment for a gourmet dinner which he prepared himself. His guests were people he thought would find the others interesting.
Sid had been invited a couple of times and said the conversation flowed and was always entertaining and great fun, even though it was invariably a very eclectic bunch – celebrities and ordinary folks, actors and athletes, young and old, black and white, doctors and trolley car drivers and automobile mechanics. People of different ages and ethnicities and backgrounds and professions, apparently with nothing in common.
Oh, wait … they all had one thing in common: They all were customers of the little Italian barber.
Was that a cool idea, or what!
Jim, yes, it was a cool idea. But do you think that could be pulled off now, in the Era of Narcissism and Me First?
Even so, I think that a barber with a wide and varied clientele would be the ideal person to make it work.
God bless our barbers! The three toughest things to find when moving to a new town are a mechanic you can trust with your cars, a laundry to do your shirts right, and a good barber!