We live in an age of hyperbole, where everything has to be the greatest, the best, always an A+, never a C. Maybe that’s why I was so surprised by a sign I saw the other day at a strip shopping center in Wheaton, Md.: OK Barber Shop.
Not World’s Best Barber Shop. Not Luxury Barber Shop. Not Excellent Barber Shop. Just OK.
Who, I wondered, would be so honest as to pick “OK” for the name of their business? I stopped by the Glenmont Shopping Center, at Georgia Avenue and Randolph Road, to get the story.
“It’s my name,” said Ok Yi, who has owned the barbershop for 16 years.
Ok is a Korean name, and Korea is where Ok is from originally. It’s pronounced “Oh,” though if you’re feeling daring you can put a sort of glottal stop at the end.
“Most customers call me ‘Okay,’” she said.
Ok is okay with that.
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New customers, she said, are sometimes confused by the shop’s name, thinking it shouldn’t be so modest. We’re used to exaggeration, and when we don’t see it we start to worry.
“You’re better than okay,” they tell her.
But Ok is okay with being “OK.”
She came to the United States in 1995 and became a citizen in 2002. She worked at other barbershops before striking out on her own. There’s been a barber in this spot since the shopping center opened in the 1960s.
“This kind of business is not easy,” said Ok, 55. More than once a customer has sprung from his chair and dashed out without paying. Can you imagine?
The OK Barber Shop is a melting pot. In addition to the Korean Ok, there’s a barber from Cambodia, one from Paraguay and two from Vietnam. The customers are international, too, just like our country.
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These days I wonder whether America is okay. Sometimes I wish it could be run out of a barbershop rather than an Oval Office.
London calling
Across the Glenmont Shopping Center parking lot is another memorably named hair establishment: Ruffles of London.
Of London? In Wheaton? Really?
Dubious, I decided to check out this claim.
“It’s not a lie,” owner Sylvia Michael told me. “I was raised in London. I had a hair salon called Sylvia’s Hair Fashions on the Old Kent Road, next to the Lord Nelson pub.”
That was in the 1960s, after Sylvia had graduated from the Morris School of Hairdressing in Piccadilly Circus. When she lost her lease in 1973, Sylvia decided to strike out for the States, where her husband’s sister lived.
Like Ok, Sylvia worked in other shops before opening her own. Why not resurrect the name Sylvia’s Hair Fashions?
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“Forget that,” Sylvia said. “We just decided we wanted something that sounded nice. ‘Ruffles’ means ‘curls.’ And we definitely wanted to put the ‘London’ in there.”
It does give the place a Mary Quant/Jean Shrimpton sort of vibe.
Sylvia, 72, doesn’t cut hair anymore (she does real estate), but her sister Eve Georgiou and sister-in-law Ivy Themistokleous work in the shop. (The women are Greek Cypriots whose families moved to London.)
Finally, let the record show that last year a third stylist opened in the shopping center. That shop has a less mysterious name: Jenny’s Hair Salon, after the owner.
I'm going nuts
I feel like I’m living in a pachinko machine, one of those noisy Japanese pinball contraptions.
It isn’t metal balls that are cascading all around me, it’s acorns. I sit at home and listen as they ping off the roof and bounce off the windows.
I think there’s been a bumper crop this year, which can only mean one thing: More squirrels are on the way. You’ve been warned.
Twitter: @johnkelly
For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/john-kelly.
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