One of my guilty vacation pleasures is to visit the barber shop every year while we are in Colorado and get a haircut and a shave. Peggy calls it my “spa day” — I’m OK with that.

When I started going to Scott he was located in Dillon. I would grow a beard each summer (technically a Van Dyke) and let Scott either shave it off or trim it for me. It is kind of my end of summer ritual, even though we will still have at least two more months of summer when I return home to Baton Rouge.

A couple of years ago Scott moved up to a larger location in Frisco. He now has five or six barbers working for him and the place has become very busy. So busy, in fact, that my failure to make an advance online reservation proved to be fatal to my plan to have Scott do the job. Since today was the only time I had set aside I decided to walk in and take my chances.

The young man who cut my hair today did an excellent job, but he was nervous about the shave. He told me that he had not shaved anyone since he finished barber school a few months before. I told him to relax and do his best.

I am not giving his name because he cut me. It didn’t hurt, but any cut on your face bleeds like a mother. He was so upset by it that I was comforting him. It really was no big deal, but Scott came over and looked at it and said, “Guess who just got a free haircut?” I tipped the young man $20 and told him not to worry about it — chalk it up as an experience to improve his technique.

It did not ruin the experience at all, and I recommend the shop to anyone I know who is going to be in the Summit County area. Of course, next year I will make my reservation in advance. We went ahead and did everything we had planned to do for the day. But for now, I am going to try to get some sympathy mileage out of it.

Chicks dig scars.