Fred, the Barber of Melville
SCALA’S SCISSORS-WIELDING OWNER WILL MAKE ROSSINI PROUD Each week Marie-Lais looks out for the unusual, the unique, the downright quirky or just something or someone we might have had no idea about, even though we live here. We like to travel our own cit
stands for Fred, not Figaro, but as a scene set, people nevertheless move on and off the stage of the Scala. The characters’ concerns are politics, intrigue and relationships, much as in Rossini’s 1800s.
This Scala got its name because it was originally housed across the road where the Scala moviehouse stands, though not used for much except as an investment of the owner. And the movie house was named after the opera house, despite the fact that there was nary a stair in it, except to the loos and the projection booth.
When the old bioscope shut down in the early 1970s, Fred’s father took his scissors, Fred and the signboard across the road, where they continued soaping, razoring and cutting. Fred says people are funny. Customers would go to the old shop and, not finding it where they last left it, would leave. He’s right. People are funny, possibly not as comic as Rossini’s buffoons, but they do their best.
The man draped in a sheet of cloth picks up from her voice that Heather’s from the States. He gives her a talk about the problems of the vote there. He tells her that the real issue is “you’re stuck with Trump,” that the alternative party represents “the other side, Hispanics and so on. So what can you do!” Heather is quiet. I suggest he might be less stuck if he voted for an Hispanic president. His eyebrows change direction, now pointing to his nose.
Fred dusts him off, despatches him and tells us before he wraps the next customer that though he charges a hundred these days, it was seventy rands before that and, even at that price, he had people who left without paying, saying they’d bring the money and, years later, still dodge him embarrassedly. He mentions that we’d know one of them very well.
On the matter of relationships, he says a lot of what he’s told from the barber chair is X-rated material but he won’t divulge anything, again because we may well know those involved. It’s interesting how a barber has held that traditional role since Figaro’s days.
With the smiling, blue-shirted man who wears two combs in his top pocket, iconically leaning in the barber shop doorway and nursing a glass of coke between customers, your secrets are safe guys.