Mike pauses after attending to his customer’s sideburns and gestures with his clippers. “You seen the movie Barber Shop? We’re totally the opposite of that… in everything except cutting hair.” Posters with numbered hairstyles face Mike and his 1920s-cast iron barber chair. “They were made before warranties, before things were made to break down,” he said when asked about the chairs.
The place used to be Coronelli’s Hair Styles founded in 1949 by a man also named Mike. Today’s Mike moved to Middletown in 1992 looking for work, having taught himself to cut hair by practicing on his three sons. The shop is still marked by the traditional tricolor barber’s pole.
“The white was for the bandages, and the red for blood and they added blue later,” he said. “Barbers were like doctors, working with blood and leeches; healing people.”
If three signs on the shop’s wall do not get the message “No Swearing” across, Mike will respectfully repeat shop policy. Mike frowns upon profanity. Not only is Mike a barber, but also a pastor, public notary, youth mentor and half a dozen other professions.
Clearly, his barbershop provides more than your timely trim. Care extends beyond your hair, encompassing your well-being and perhaps your soul. Embodying the shop’s spirit, Mike creates easy rapport of trust and faith, which are altogether good qualities for a figure worthy of one’s trust. Luckily, he is a minister of your follicles and follies. Thus, banning profanity produces the sacred conditions for a mundane yet no less significant ‘therapeutics of the modern soul,’—a haircut.
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