Scot moved to Japan at age 24 and experienced the best haircut of his life. As a stranger in a strange land, Scot stumbled into this perfect experience a bit unexpectedly. We examine what made that haircut so special, and then snap back to the present to find a way to recreate it with some help from my friend Jose and Ivan Gomez from Barber and Gent in San Francisco.
Barber and Gent: BarberAndGent.com
Boothee: https://www.bootheeapp.online/
Music from this episode by:
Shawn Korkie – https://www.fiverr.com/shawnkorkie
Gelyan – https://www.fiverr.com/gelyanov
Shivam S – https://www.fiverr.com/imshivamsingh
Avishka31 – https://www.fiverr.com/avishka31
kgrapofficial – https://www.fiverr.com/kgrapofficial
Nearbysound – https://www.fiverr.com/nearbysound
Bastereon – https://www.fiverr.com/bastereon
Komiku – https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku
Aandy Valentine – https://www.fiverr.com/aandyvalentine
Photos of Ivan Gomez, Jose Vidal, and Scot Maupin by Sarah Alfaro:
TRANSCRIPT:
Quick Note: 24 was a tv show that premiered 24 years ago and each season took place over one 24 hour day cut into twenty-four one-hour episodes. They would remind you it was in ‘real time’ with a beeping clock before the end of an episode or going into commercials. So, letting you know, the beeping sounds on this episode are from the show 24, ok? Ok. Here we go.
[INTRO MUSIC/SOUNDS]
- Hi, and welcome to The Perfect Show. I’m your host, Scot Maupin. I’m what you might call a perfection prospector, sifting through life looking for little things or experiences that could be considered ‘perfect.’ Join me each episode as I examine one topic that I’m presenting as a little nugget of perfection.
———————-
4/7/25
I moved to Japan when I was 24 – and experienced the best haircut of my life.
The following takes place (fade in)between 2004 and 2025 with events spanning between the countries of the United States of America and Japan.
Events occur in extremely compressed time. I mean, that’s over 20 years, guys, so of course.
For an American to move to Japan you first need a visa, and in order to get a visa you need to land a job who will sponsor you for one. A place that says yes, government, we need this person to come in and we promise they will have a job when they get here.
When I was 24 one way to get a work visa for Japan was through NOVA, a private English conversation school with many branches across the country – it was kind of a meat grinder continually hiring young foreigners.
I did an interview with them in Chicago, got hired, and then I got word that I had been placed, – meaning I had been plugged into whatever city the next opening was at – so I bought a one-way plane ticket to Japan.
I would be living and working in KitaKyushu, a mid-sized city of about a million people on the northern tip of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s 4 main islands.
Kitakyushu is an industrial city. Steel is a major industry there. It was described to me as the Japanese Pittsburgh, which it may be, but I couldn’t tell you, because I’ve never been to Pittsburgh. [beat] I hear it’s like the American Kitakyushu, though.
I flew from Kansas City to Tokyo, and then on to Fukuoka. The largest city and capital of Kyushu. I took a train to Kokura, the city where I would be living.
Working for NOVA could become an all-encompassing lifestyle for a foreigner in Japan. NOVA jobs came with NOVA apartments and NOVA roommates, which meant NOVA friend groups and often NOVA romances.
NOVA was also all English. All English at work, all English at home, all English at hangouts. NOVA sold their school as an immersive English experience in part because they often staffed up with people who didn’t speak Japanese. I was not in the right spot. I found myself living in Japan but still having to work too hard to get to use any Japanese on the regular.
I had my own problems with NOVA, but the main problem was that that job felt like it was in an insulated bubble away from the real Japan. A bubble I knew I wanted very much to pop as soon as I could.
This is where I had been lucky, arriving in March. In Japan, the public school calendar begins each year in April, making this the perfect time to test a hungry job market.
So even though I had only been in the country and working for NOVA for two weeks, I applied to, interviewed with, and got hired by a different company, all very quickly, becoming the new ALT at two Japanese junior high schools. Places where I would be the only foreigner and all the other teachers would be Japanese.
Japanese junior high, or Chuugakko, is grades 7-9.
I would be an ALT, or Assistant Language Teacher, and I’d be working in tandem with a few different JTEs at each school- Japanese Teachers of English.
Each class would be led by a Japanese English teacher, the JTE, and I would also be there as the ALT – Assistant Language Teacher.
The JTE’s job was the real teacher stuff, planning curriculum, assigning homework, giving grades, all that stuff. My function on paper was primarily to help the kids work on their pronunciation and grammar questions, sure, but honestly I think I was mostly just there to put a real life foreigner in the same room with these kids.
Sometimes – not infrequently – I would be the first non-Japanese person they’ve had any significant contact with. So in a way part of my job was to be an ambassador for the entire world outside of Japan.
Oh, and to make games. A big part of my job was coming up with little games we could play in class that used English in some way, but were also fun and engaging.
My first day was at Yoshida Junior High School, a small school on the outskirts of the city of North Kokura.
I would be here every other week, and teach at a bigger school in the city in between, but something about Yoshida felt more welcoming to me, and so it quickly became my favorite school of the two.
Oh, right, it’s probably partly because Yoshida was a much smaller school, with fewer classes, so I had more free time to do other things.
When I wasn’t needed in an English class, I was left back in the teachers’ room. The teacher’s room in a Japanese school is sort of like a teacher’s lounge, but set up like a large classroom with desks for all the staff. Not in cubicles, but pushed up against each other in rows or little pods. This room was the base of operations for all the teachers when they didn’t have a class to teach, me included.
In Japanese schools, the students stay in the same cluster, in the same classroom, at the same desks, and then the teachers switch rooms each period instead of the kids, so it just makes more sense for teachers keep their main desks down in the teacher’s room.
During those free periods, when I wasn’t puzzling over how to make up interesting English learning games for Japanese tweens and teens I would fill the time studying Japanese for myself. I know, wild man.
Meanwhile, another matter that I had handled temporarily before moving was starting to cause a problem again and like a clock ticking down it was becoming harder and harder to ignore.
My hair.
In my getting ready to move to Japan preparations I had gotten a super-short haircut right before I left, so I wouldn’t have to think about it, and now, about a month later, I could tell that I was coming due again.
Thinking back on all my years of language classes, mock conversations about eating and drinking, going places and buying things, I realized I knew how to say that I had gotten a haircut, or was going to get a haircut, or was currently in the process of getting a haircut,
Also that I had been given a haircut, I wanted to get a haircut, and of course the negative versions of all those sentences as well. — I mean one of the things I have always enjoyed about Japanese is conjugating verbs. Honestly.
It’s a nightmare in English, for sure, but you may not be surprised to find out Japanese has a much more rigid verb structure, which it follows closely, and so Japanese verbs conjugate quite orderly and predictably, in a way I find very pleasing.
So I knew how to say all that. I could pull out the Japanese for talking about getting a ‘haircut,’ but I had no idea how to go about actually getting one.
Then waiting for the bus home after work one day, I saw a house across the street where the lower level had a little barber pole attached next to the front door, which is apparently the international sign for haircut place, and so I made a note that this would be the place I’d come back to when I was ready.
What would I need to be ready? Well, first – a budget. I hadn’t quite gotten my one and only paycheck from NOVA yet, and my first paycheck from this new job wouldn’t come for a while. I was just living off the quickly-vanishing chunk of starting money I had brought with me.
So I wasn’t flush with cash, and I also had no idea how much a haircut in Japan would even cost. Go ahead, think about it right now. Is it more expensive than where you live? Less? The same? Why? – I mean it’s hard, right? Yeah, back when I was 24 I didn’t know either.
So I potentially planned to spend – like I thought my MAX would be 7000 yen. Now when I was in Japan the exchange rate was 110 or 115 yen to the dollar. It moved around all the time, but basically you could just add a decimal place and be ~90% accurate. A budget of 7000 yen was a budget of about ~$70.00. $63.63 to be more accurate. Now that same amount would be $48.18, by the way, due to inflation and exchange rates. 7000 Yen wouldn’t be an insanely crazy amount to pay for a haircut, even back then, but prior to this I had been like a $20 Supercuts guy so it would have been a big jump for me.
I was hoping it would be under my budget’s 7000 yen limit, of course, but I could see no way to check the price without just walking in. So I told myself I would ask how much it was, and if it was over my ceiling, I’d thank the person, walk out, and figure it out some other way. I mean I had more cash than that on me, but I was resolved that I shouldn’t go above my limit. No more than 7000 yen.
I also prepared by taking some of the prep periods I had for preparing games and classes and using them to prepare for this haircut instead. I’m there at my desk in the teacher’s room, trying to learn the words I thought I would need. Figuring out how to say, ‘shave the bottom parts really short’ and I didn’t even know how to look up what to say for the longer parts. Feathering? Blending?
Several college courses in Japanese, thousands of flashcards and hundreds of tests under my belt, and my current abilities in this situation basically boiled down to me walking in the door and saying the Japanese for ‘Oh, hello. I’d like one haircut please, I’ll be taking no further questions at this time, thank you.’
But I did remember that I still had the universal language of pictures, so I drew out a comic book version of my head with the haircut I wanted.
I wrote labels in Japanese, with lines pointing to the relevant parts of the drawing, and then one afternoon with that small drawing, a big mop of blonde hair, and all the confidence I could muster, I left Yoshida Junior High and headed to the haircutting place
My anxiety was at its peak as I reached that door handle, unsure of what would be on the other side, but I opened it and stepped into…
…a totally normal Japanese hair salon, clearly catering to older japanese women, and while there wasn’t an audible record scratch when I entered, that’s essentially exactly what happened. Every eye looked at me and every conversation stopped.
Expressions ran the spectrum you might expect to see if one morning you woke to find a bear in your kitchen. Definitely bewilderment, a bit of apprehension, but mostly just a general confusion as to how a me had come to be there at all.
I had walked into this small salon’s lobby area. There were two haircut chairs, the kind that go up and down, spin around and lean back. One already occupied by a woman having her hair done. There were about 4 other middle aged Japanese women in the waiting area, the ladies who had all been talking before I walked in.
So, I was probably not in the right place. However, with ten eyes all locked on me in a pretty small area, it became clear that simply ducking out was going to be a bit trickier mission.
So I froze, unsure of what to say or to whom .
I really wanted to leave, but I felt like I had to say something first – to make some sort of comment on my way out the door, you know? So I asked the closest woman how much a haircut was, and I thought I caught her saying it was 2000 yen – so, like 20 bucks – but then in fast Japanese she listed some other things that I didn’t understand using haircut words I hadn’t studied, with other prices that I didn’t catch and, not that I love admitting now when I don’t understand something, but back then I was really in nod-and-smile mode a lot of the time.
And so when she got to the end of her spiel, I realized she had asked me a question, but I wasn’t sure what it was, or how to answer. I remember just sort of giving her a blank look until a different Japanese woman came over, motioned for me to go to the empty chair, and… I just went with it.
I sat down, handed her the picture I had drawn of my own head with a shorter hairdo, and despite all my preloaded verbs and conjugations, I think I only said ‘Kami o kitte kudasai’ – ’please cut my hair.’
There was A LOT of talk about what would happen next. Like talking around me, not talking with me. A lot of fast Japanese talk that I wasn’t picking up, and the woman who sat me down had then placed a call on the store’s phone. I heard a lot more Japanese, but my ears zeroed in on one word that flew by in particular. This was one I had picked up in my preparations, and also strangely never encountered in my years of Japanese classes prior.
The word ‘Kinpatsu’ – literally translated as Gold Hair – it’s the Japanese word for blonde. Kinpatsu. A word I would pick out of conversations that happened around me in Japan a bunch after this and know I was being talked about, but this was the first time it was happening.
She listened for a second, gave a short response, and hung up. Then back to me as if nothing happened. I really didn’t know what to think. What was that? No clue.
But, what followed was an experience, or rather a series of small experiences, like I had never had before.
First, the chair got pumped up, then I got turned around and laid back into a sink to have my hair washed. I had gotten this as part of my haircut in the US a few times as a kid, but not since becoming an adult.
If you haven’t had someone else wash your hair before, it’s quite nice. You get the rare feeling of having the weight of your head actually in someone else’s hands, letting them lather up your hair with soap and massage your scalp a bit in the process. Then wash all the shampoo off without you having to move your head around too much to get all the areas.
In that way it feels way nicer than just washing your hair in the shower. And I’m just now realizing that I haven’t had anyone wash my hair for me maybe since this very haircut, but I do clearly remember how it feels from this one and the few times it happened to me as a kid so this is a vividly locked in sense memory, for sure.
After the shampoo, she wrapped my head in a towel, and then the first new experience hit. While I was still horizontal, she got a hot towel out of some steaming cube thing, and then laid it down on my face.
Now I had never had a hot towel placed on my face before. It’s nice. A little jolting at first, especially if you haven’t ever done this before and weren’t expecting it, but your skin quickly adapts to the warmth, and you close your eyes and it’s just such a nice pleasant heat.
In fact the only unpleasant part was this nagging sensation in the back of my mind that maybe I hadn’t quite ordered this haircut right, because while the heat of the towel was relaxing, it also wasn’t because I was pretty sure this wasn’t part of a normal cut.
After a bit, the hot towel came off my face, and then as I expected to sit up for my haircut, I stayed down, and instead this nice woman brought a brush over and started to lather up my face with foam instead.
Looks like this was going to be a shave now, too. And that would make it the first time someone else was going to shave me ever, another first.
So she foamed my face up and then she really surprised me by pulling out a straight razor. Like the hingey kind that opens up. At home I was an electric razor guy almost exclusively and had never thought about going Sweeney Todd style before. But now this Japanese woman that I was only kind of successfully communicating with was set to glide this sharp razor all around my throat.
I also knew for sure now I was getting something different than what I wanted, which meant a different, now unspecified price tag, so that was running through my head, too.
It was a short-lived panic, though, because I quickly discovered that being shaved by someone who knows what they are doing is really, really nice. And after the hot towel and now this shave, I told myself the price didn’t matter. I would still be thrilled if whatever I ordered came in under my 7000 yen limit, but I guess I would understand if it didn’t. This was amazing, so I made up my mind that I’d just enjoy the experience this one time, and then cough up whatever they asked at the end.
She went over my entire beard area, trimming away every single hair until I was more sharply shaved than I had ever been as an adult.
I was pretty much in a different mental state from that point on. Something about getting the shave, then having your face wiped off and an aftershave applied, you get a feeling, like your skin is vibrating, hot and cold simultaneously.
Now fully shaved and sitting back up, I saw that a new woman had joined us in the shop, and it became clear that this was who my stylist had called on the phone.
She was an older Japanese woman, and I’m going to make some assumptions here because I was translating as best I could in the moment, but it seemed like the older woman was the retired mother or mother-in-law of the woman who was cutting my hair.
The woman cutting my hair thanked the older woman for coming and was like so you’ve cut ‘kinpatsu’ hair before?
And this is when the older woman smiled and said nope, but I wanted to watch, and all the ladies laughed. Actually the sound of these Japanese women talking and laughing about me was pretty constant throughout this experience. – which I love.
The mother and daughter now began to talk quickly, and the younger woman started cutting my hair. I was no longer being consulted about anything, which was completely fine by me, too.
The haircut was superb. She really went through and made sure it was all short and laid correctly. Great haircut. So at least that part of my worry was put at ease, whatever I would end up paying, I would at least come out of it with a decent haircut, AND the story.
It might be closer to that 7000 yen ceiling on my budget but also totally worth it for a solid haircut and my first straight razor shave. It was that memorable of an experience.… But she wasn’t quite done yet.
Next the straight razor comes back out and I experienced not just a series of ‘firsts,’ but a series of ‘news.’ Like as in new things I didn’t even know were things.
I’m trying to say that this woman shaved my forehead, and like the sides of my eyes? There’s no hair there, but she shaved it, I don’t get it. But yeah, shaved my forehead-neighborhood, cutting all the tiny invisible hairs that did exist but I didn’t know about – weird feeling. Good. But weird.
Then she brought the razor in to tighten up my hairline on the front and sides, and all across the back.
Next up were my ears. Yeah. She took the razor swiftly into each ear, and then along the outside, removing any peachfuzz. All still unexpected, by the way. Everyone around me seemed to be talking, mind you, but no one was talking to me. And when someone has a razor whipping around next to your ear it turns out you don’t talk much either, you just sort of sit still and try not to move the best you can.
She then put the razor down, but picked up some tweezers and turned back to my face, proceeding to pluck my eyebrow hairs. So I got my brows shaped, another first for me.
Now every hair on my head that I could imagine and even some that I couldn’t imagine had already been cut so I figured we were done, but instead she grabbed my head with her bare hands and started giving me a scalp massage.
You know those head massager things, the wooden ones with the four arms that have wooden balls at the end, or the metal one that looks like a broken whisk that you push down on your head or whatever? Garbage. Throw them in the garbage, compared to what this woman was doing.
From my head she moved down to massage my neck and then my shoulders, also amazingly, and at this point I’m now completely past my budget ceiling, mentally. Like whatever this costs it will have been worthwhile. I’ll pay it and figure out where I went wrong later.
My mental calculator was still pre-tabulating, though. I’m now guessing we have blown past 7000 yen into more like 13000 yen territory. Ichi man San zen en. – around $130 – DEFINITELY not something I can do every month on my salary and with the Japanese cost of living, but would I gladly pay it this time? For what I just got? Yes, I would. Absolutely.
Then the woman walks away for a minute. Leaving me, this big caucasian stick of butter, just sitting there. Almost entranced. When the woman comes back, she removes the drape I was wearing and hands me something.
I reach out and take it, it’s cold. It’s…an ice cream sandwich, wrapped up in paper. She’s still talking, everyone is still talking. And now I’m suddenly holding ice cream. A thing I try never to do without a plan.
Ice cream, by it’s very nature, is a ticking clock, it has to be, especially in Southern Japan, so I knew this was the end of my magical haircut experience. I braced myself to just smile and pay,
And then she rang me up. For 2000 yen. $20. $17.39 to be specific. But that was it. No tax, no tip – because there is no tipping in Japan, not because I’m a jerk, but just 2000 yen, displayed in front of me on the register, and I was shocked.
I paid. I left. I stood outside on the street that afternoon. I unwrapped the ice cream sandwich. It was the classic kind with vanilla ice cream between two chocolate wafer rectangles. I ate. I walked. I reflected. (Slowly)And I think I locked in a certain amount of faith in humanity that I hope never goes away.
I feel like some sort of door was opened to me that afternoon in a way I can’t fully describe, but it was both a familiar experience and a foreign one at the same time.
The familiar experience of a haircut but one unlike any I’d ever had before.
Being taken care of like that, pampered, worked on, fixed up like a car in the shop. For them to usher me in, instead of asking me to go somewhere else, and all the kind attention that was paid to me, as a result, I really did feel spectacular.
You leave a good styling with an extra pep. A palpable energy. Feeling refreshed. It gives you a real confidence boost. For a kid from Kansas who was now in the middle of Japan, every bit of boost was welcome.
I ate the ice cream sandwich as I walked back to the bus stop, enjoying the wind blowing through my new haircut. I pulled out my iPod, plugged in my headphones, and I didn’t say anything. There was no one to talk to.
I felt different though. I had just gotten a haircut and a shave, but I think I was also learning something about myself. Uncertainty can make me anxious, but kindness can bring me back.
When I wasn’t quite sure how to get what I needed, I proactively took the first steps, sure, but ultimately I was met halfway by someone who helped me through.
It was the quality of the experience, and also the wonder of it. Feeling like I hadn’t found it so much as it had somehow found me. And feeling like I got a priceless service, in a way that didn’t break the bank for me.
I stepped onto the bus with less hair, but with more confidence that people in the world will be there for us when we need help.
I sat back, listened to my music, and let the bus drive me away.
Straight razor shaves became the norm for me in Japan after that. Not for every time I shaved, but practically every time I got a haircut. On those occasions, I would go to actual barbers for men where I lived instead of a women’s salon near my work, and I would get a haircut and shave both on purpose, and using the right Japanese, but none of those cuts ever measured up to this first one. I mean, with the surprise element and all the extra details I’m not sure how they really could.
But then this is something that becomes difficult to recreate, because by now I’ve had that experience a bunch of times. Even though I haven’t had a shave since I moved back to America, if I got one now it still wouldn’t be like that first experience. I couldn’t recreate my first straight-razor shave. I mean, not with this old face.
Hmm
What if we could find someone with a different face than mine and then just figure out how to switch faces somehow maybe. Some method by which we could swap my old face, with someone else ’s young face.
Thankfully back in 1997 Nicolas Cage provided us a simple way to solve this very problem.
[FACE OFF CLIP – “I’d like to take his face OFF”]
“Tiny surgery — I’d like to take his face OFF. – cast. You want to take his face? Yes, his face, off. Eyes, nose skin – FACE. OFF. “
[FACE/OFF CLIP] – 1997 face transplant scene – next paragraph over the audio from this clip
This is a scene from the movie Face/OFF (face-slash-off) and this is the part where they are taking the face off of John Travolta and replacing it with the face of Nicolas Cage. Hear that? That’s the Face/Off lasers that are cutting the faces off.
[HEY GOOGLE ”Is Face OFF surgery covered by my insurance?” ]
No? Dang. Ok. Oh well. Guess I’ll have to resort to Plan B.
So Plan B is way less complicated than Plan A — you know, because Plan A had insurance co-pays and Face/Off lasers, but Plan B is also tricky because it relies on heaping MY little quest onto SOMEONE ELSE’s shoulders, or face in this case.
Plan B would really just be to find a 24 year old who hasn’t ever had a straight-razor shave, and then set them up to see how one feels for the first time. It would recreate the experience, and also pay it forward. Giving someone a sort of a pampered experience out of nowhere, and then just sending them on their way.
No problem. Just need a 24 year old. Except that I am not 24 years old anymore, nor are any of my friends. OK, So maybe one problem. Where to find Someone who’s 24.
It was actually not that long of a search. There’s really only one place in my life that I come into any regular contact with people in their 20’s at all, and that is at the jiu-jitsu gym.
For Brazilian jiu-jitsu, the martial art I’ve been doing for a long time, you join a gym, and then on any given night you could spar or train with partners who are older or younger or bigger or smaller than you, it’s just whoever is there.
It is easily one of the most age-varied spaces I go to, and so when I needed to recruit someone who was 24 for this task, I thought of my friend Jose.
Jose Vidal does jiu-jitsu with me at Magalit Jiu-jitsu in San Francisco, CA, our gym in the Mission neighborhood.
We would talk small talk stuff or chit-chat here or there, but I didn’t know exactly how old he was and he didn’t know that I make a podcast, so one day I had to go through the awkward moment of like – Hi, so how old are you? – He was 24. Perfect.
Have you ever had a straight razor shave before? He hadn’t — you know, normal questions like that.
So I told Jose what I had in mind and he said he would be down. We were all set to go, except this was back in the year 2022 but then….a certain unnamed person named me stopped making episodes and so we paused for a while.
I still did Jiu-jitsu with Jose, we just didn’t talk about the podcast thing.
But now it is 2025, I’m back in, Jose is back in, and we are back on.
[JOSE ASK NAME AND TELL NAME AND 27 YEARS OLD]
So right, yeah, Jose isn’t 24 anymore of course. But he was 24, back when I originally asked him to do it. so…we’re gonna say that still counts. Look, I wanna still use my 24 sound effects. I mean, we also can’t switch to 27 at this point because I definitely don’t have the funds to buy 27 dresses.
And most importantly, Jose was willing to help carry out this mission.
And we would be doing our mission in the historic Mission District of San Francisco. On Mission Street even. Because that’s the street where Magalit Jiu Jitsu is, at 29th and Mission, like I said earlier, but also because just down a way on the same street is a place called Barber and Gent. The logo on their window has a straight razor graphic that I notice when I walk past, and it just seemed like a sign, literally, that I should just keep it all there in the same neighborhood.
I got in touch with the owner, Ivan Gomez, and we set up a time at his shop for Jose right before a wedding he would be attending.
And Jose was shaggy, which was totally on me because we had loosely planned to do it in May but we had been moving back and forth trying to figure out a time between his schedule and mine. Now we were at the end of May and his hair had been growing the whole time, of course.
CLIP – [WHY BEEN HOLDING OFF HAIRCUT – THIS IS SOMETHING WE NEED TO DO – GREAT]
We headed down to Barber and Gent, which is also a hair salon called Blanca’s Art of Hair. That’s what’s printed on the on the awning, more on that later,
But walking in was like going through a little portal. Stepping into an old barbershop with classic red barber chairs and black-and-white photographs on the walls. History was everywhere. And so were the sounds of music, clippers, and conversations. [PLAY THESE SOUNDS UNDER THIS? TKTK]
We connected with Ivan and his stylist, Sarah. I introduced Jose, and they had him take a seat in one of those red chairs.
CLIP – [IVAN INTRO – HOW DO YOU WANT HAIRCUT TODAY? – JOSE PULLS OUT A PICTURE ]
This made me smile. Looks like the picture method I used in Japan is still a go-to today even without the language barrier…
After talking about the style, Ivan sets up his equipment and lays everything out at his station. Then he starts the haircut, and lays out a bit of the shop’s history as well. Here are some good moments from that conversation.
TAPE –
That was Blanca’s Art of Hair – The name on the awning.
TAPE –
Ivan moved away from barbering as an adult and went to school for design, but Ivan discovered that working as a designer wasn’t quite what he’d imagined.
TAPE –
Then there, working inside his mother’s salon, which Ivan took over fully about 10 years ago, he used his design background to create Barber and Gent, while still keeping Blanca’s Art of Hair, and the business became both a hair salon and barbershop in one, honoring both of Ivan’s parents.
TAPE –
Ivan was surrounded by men in his life who were well-groomed and stylish, and it made him want to cater to clients who appreciated those finer things and provide that kind of service to others.
TAPE –
As the haircut continued, Ivan and Jose swapped stories about growing up in San Francisco, about their families and neighborhoods. Just classic barbershop stuff. (fade this over the part of Jose’s story)
Ivan finished Jose’s haircut, and then it was time for the shave.
He dropped the chair back and started by pulling out an eye dropper and droppering a pre-shave oil on Jose, then a cream.
TAPE –
So I had been thinking all flip open straight-razors were the same thing, just the single Sweeny Todd type blade, a kitchen knife on a hinge. But this was more of a contraption.
Like the difference between a wooden pencil and a mechanical pencil, but for blades. It was a neat little handle, for sure , and I gotta say I’m not mad at the point about it being way more sanitary.
TAPE –
It still had the same shape and flipping-open action, but this was a handle with a slide that popped open and then a slot for you to insert a new razor blade into, after one little modification.
TAPE –
And while it turns out having a razor to my throat makes it hard for me ask questions, I do a little bit better when it’s someone else’s face getting the blade.
So I asked Ivan how he learned to do this.
TAPE –
So Jose was now cut, shaved, and looking sharp.
Sarah got him styled up while I took care of the tab with Ivan, and then we headed out.
TAPE –
After ice cream sandwiching Jose and sending him off, I talked again with Ivan and Sarah about the core of the experience I was trying to capture.
TAPE –
In the end I wanted to give someone the chance to experience a haircut and a shave, sure, but I also wanted to recreate a situation I had where it felt like I wound up with a great thing that was just the product of being in the right place at the right time. I think it changed me for the better, and so this became about passing that optimism in others along somehow if I could.
To provide someone a nice thing that they weren’t exactly needing or expecting, partially in an attempt to keep creating a world where those things can and do happen to people.
Just a quick burst of unexpected positive energy. The kind of thing I think has the potential to maybe stick with someone for the rest of their life.
And with that, my first haircut in Japan, and my first straight-razor shave ever, becomes the next entry into the Perfectorium, the index of perfect things.
Go to the show’s website perfectshowpodcast.com to see pictures and videos related to each episode, – this time I, however, managed to delete all the pictures and videos I took by updating the app before I had backed them up. I literally deleted them as I was transferring everything for this episode over to my computer, because of course I did. I’m trying to tell myself that at least I didn’t delete any audio for the episode and that’s a win, but man I would have liked to have those pictures.
I was able to get some photos from Sarah at Barber and Gent that she’s letting me post on the website and there will be a link to the spot on their site about the experience as well.
You can see all the entries to the Perfectorium, including this one, at the direct link for it, perfectshowpodcast.com/perfectorium.
Thank you to Jose Vidal for lending me his face for this. Huge thank yous also to Ivan Gomez, for the excellent haircut and shave, and to Sarah Alfaro, for styling, facilitating everything with Barber and Gent, and making the whole experience so smooth. To check out any of their services and book an appointment, you can go to barberandgent.com, all one word.
Ivan also asked me if we could plug a company he works with to connect with other barbers and stylists.
TAPE – [BLUE – OH YEAH WELL WE WANNA GIVE A SHOUTOUT TO OUR FRIENDS OVER AT BOOTHEE PLUG – LOCATIONS THAT ARE LOOKING TO HIRE CAN FIND YOU THERE] 27 sec
So if you’re a barber who likes the way Ivan’s does things you can sign up through the app to get your own chair there to see your clients.
You can find the info and links for Barber and Gent, for Blanca’s Art of Hair, and for all the musical artists in the show notes and on this episode’s webpage.
As always, if you’d like to contact the show, you can email PerfectShowShow@gmail.com, and connect on most socials to the name PerfectShowShow.
Also, I do see the comments for episodes on Spotify. Thank you, those are great.
Once again I am back to saying that subscribing via your favorite pod portal really is the best way to get every episode, I mean I got cocky enough just. last. episode. to say these come out every four weeks now and then this one takes until now – yeah I know, that’s how Karma works. Yeah, I get it.
If you’re this deep into the show and still here at all then you’re probably already subscribed to The Perfect Show, so thank you, but if not, just subscribe, baby!
If you are enjoying these and want to drop a perfect rating or review, please do. It’s the easiest way to support the show.
I’m continuing my season of reviewing other shows at the end of my episodes and today I want to talk about a pod called HyperFixed.
HyperFixed is a show made by Alex Goldman and his talented team. You might know Alex as one of the hosts of the podcast Reply All, you might know him as the author of many excellent tweets, like I do, or you might know him as that guy who found an answer to your odd question, or a solution to your strange problem, because that’s who Alex is on every episode of HyperFixed.
People submit their problems and HyperFixed goes about fixing them. This is their first season, and they’re doing cool things. Two of my favorite episodes have been ‘Two Birds, One Hundred Stones,’ which tells the story of a lost song, and ‘Little By Little,’ where they go on a quest for a forgotten font.
The episodes are charming and creative, with weird tangents and satisfying payoffs. If you’re a fan of this show, then there’s a strong strong chance you’d dig HyperFixed too, if you don’t already.
So, lets leave a review. Open up the purple podcasts app on my iPad, search bar top right – Hyperfixed all one word, there it is.
Edit out the downtime and here you go:
Rating: five stars
Title: Full of Delights and Surprises
The review reads: Every episode of this show is a new little gem. Alex and his team are so great at making us care as they tell the story of a problem and how they fixed it. Quirky and inventive. Fun and charming to the core.
And…submitted. There we go.
This episode was recorded and mixed at Milky Way Studios in Oakland, CA.
And please know, I think I’m more of an old timey comedy dork than most and this whole episode being about a shave and a haircut – it took everything in me not to shoehorn the whole episode somehow down a rabbit hole for the jingle that goes ’Shave and a Haircut – 2 bits’ I mean, I did research how the 2 bits in that phrase means 25 cents and that it comes from when they would literally cut up Spanish dollar coins like a pizza into bits, or ‘pieces of eight,’ each one worth ⅛ of a dollar. So then 2 bits, or or 2 ‘pieces of eight,’ or two pizza slices of the coin, would be 2/8, or a quarter, and that’s how you get to 25 cents.
Look, I wanted to go off on a whole tangent about it but I ultimately decided I didn’t want to hijack the show, and that I just simply didn’t have enough time to include the shave and a haircut melody anywhere at all in this episode.
Although, says who? Podcasts aren’t a set length, there’s no time limit on these things. I could theoretically keep yammering into this microphone forever, I mean it’s not like there’s a ticking clock somewhere that is going to fade in and start beeping to tell me it’s time to stop talking and end the show already… oh.
Anyway, until next time, I’m Scot Maupin, and thanks for listening to The Perfect Show.
[Outro music – 50 eggs]