The Slice: Snip snip here, snip snip there, and a couple of la-dee-dahs

I thought we were done with haircut stories.

Until this arrived in the mail.

Gretchen Fouche Kuch is 79 now. But when she was a little girl, her mom sent her off with her dad to get her first haircut.

“Instead of going to a beauty shop, Dad took me to a barber and didn’t tell them I was a girl.”

Gretchen’s gender would become quite obvious in years to come. But remember, she was just a tiny kid at the time of this first haircut. And it did sort of make her look a bit like a pretty little boy.

“Needless to say, my mom did not talk to my dad for six weeks.”

But on the bright side, everyone came away from the incident with a family story that would live on and on.

And here’s one more, from Nancy Skellenger.

“Every summer my Dad would line up all the boys for their shearing. He never used the clipper attachments, so the quality of your cut depended on where you fell in the line.

“Sometimes an adult beverage was involved, as well.

“It took a bit to get in the groove. So the first kids’ results were not so good. The middle kids were the best. And the last kids were the worst. Not exactly uniform.

“Dad’s famous last words were ‘It’ll grow out, give it a couple of weeks.’ And you know what? It always did.”

Nancy’s father is long gone. But stories of his approach to barbering live on.

Nominations sought: If a newspaper columnist wanted to produce a series of vignettes based on planting himself on various park benches in our area, what specific benches would you recommend?

You know, what benches in which parks would provide for the best people-watching and randomly illuminating conversations with others on the bench?

Warm-up question: What do you remember most clearly about one of your parents teaching you to drive?

A) The yelling. B) The patience. C) The accident. D) The clutch o’ doom. E) The road rage incident. F) How there was this moment where you stopped feeling like a stupid kid and became something else. G) The entertaining stories my father told about how he learned to drive. H) How my mother was wincing the entire time we were out on the road. I) Other.

Today’s Slice questions: Who in the Spokane area receives the greatest volume of text messages in the course of a typical 24 hour day? What’s it like to be around this person?

Write The Slice at P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210; call (509) 459-5470; email pault@spokesman.com. There is no Marmot Lodge meeting this month.