The coronavirus has an upside.

Wall Street Journal

OPINION

COMMENTARY

Shear Heaven on a Brooklyn Sidewalk

I finally went out for a haircut. I got one without going in.

By Tunku Varadarajan

October 8, 2020

Brooklyn, N.Y.

Like many men of a certain age, I’ve had my hair cut in these last few months by my wife, a professor by trade. As she’s hacked at me with a pair of household scissors, my gratitude to her—and there’s been plenty of that—has always been mixed with an apprehension that she might saw off a lobe or mangle a helix (the outer rim of the ear’s upper curvature). Her skills have improved with practice, and the haircut she insisted on giving me before a beloved friend’s recent funeral was the tonsorial equivalent of homemade wine—not remotely as good as the real thing, but it served its purpose.

Although barbershops have reopened in New York, I’ve stayed away. The dank air, the lank hair on the floor, the jars of blue germicide with combs in them, and the fading photographs with hairstyles never seen on living persons all give off an unsanitary whiff, causing my inner Covid goblin to scream, “Do Not Enter.”

Picture my delight, then, as I passed my barbershop in downtown Brooklyn earlier this week and saw three chairs set up on the sidewalk. I was on my daily constitutional, with one eye on a hot-dog stand nearby; but drawn by the sight of those chairs, I crossed the street for a closer look. “You want haircut?” asked the masked Slavic lady standing by the door. “Inside or outside?” Seemingly bewitched, I mumbled “outside”—a cleansing word in these times—and was beckoned to a seat. As I sat in a barber’s bib on a swivel chair, a dog walker passed by. The most laggardly of his charges—a foot-dragging bulldog—lingered to look at me with bafflement.

I’ve had street-corner haircuts in my native Delhi, and in Guatemala City, Hanoi, Karachi and Caracas. But the idea of receiving such public grooming in prosperous brownstone Brooklyn was little short of miraculous. The shop’s manager, who observed from a distance, told me that she’d decided to emulate the local restaurants and apply for a permit from the city to serve customers outdoors. “If restaurants can, why not us?” she said. It took two weeks to get permission, all online.

My barber, a woman as dour as her hometown—industrial Kremenchuk, in central Ukraine—spoke little English. But she wielded a pair of scissors with a deftness that was a sidewalk version of heaven. She’d been in college in Ukraine, she said, and learned to be a hairdresser after emigrating to New York five years ago. And no, she’d never imagined that one day she’d be cutting hair street-side in the Land of Opportunity.

Snip-snip-snip she went, and passersby couldn’t resist the spectacle. A child stopped, transfixed, and his mother explained why “that man” was getting a haircut outside. (She got it right by intuition.) I smiled at her through my mask, and as they spoke, I felt a gentle confirmation that the little, millimetric changes in our lives have become just as profound as all the Big Things that we read about and fear. Haircuts on a Brooklyn sidewalk won’t make headlines. But on a sunny October day, they’re proof that the unraveling of our lives by Covid isn’t always ugly or unpleasant.

Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.