Word: barbershop
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When you're a devout Mormon working as an insurance salesman, show business seems like an improbable career switch. But George Osmond was never one to worry about odds. Forty-five years ago, he drove his four sons--whom he taught to sing as a barbershop quartet--to Disneyland for an impromptu performance. It was a big break not only for the Osmond Brothers but also for his five other children--most notably daughter Marie, who hosted a variety show with her brother Donnie in 1976. "We don't care which Osmond is out in front," the patriarch...
...country that's nutty about gossip, veteran barbers Cesar Larios and Manuel Rodriguez run the engine room of the national rumor mill - ? Managua's landmark Imperial Barbershop. Since this modest three-chair barbershop opened its doors 35 years ago, Rodriguez and Larios have seated, aproned and lathered some of Nicaragua's most important politicians, bankers and powerbrokers. Right-wing former president Arnoldo Alem?n and ex-communist guerrilla leader Henry "Modesto" Ruiz are both on the client list. His Eminence, Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, the country's top religious authority, has been getting the same haircut here for 30 years...
...Liberals says bad things about the Sandinistas, and the Sandinistas say bad things about the Liberals - it's a crossfire," says Larios, 56, the barbershop's founder and owner. "When they are sitting in chairs next to each other, they hug and act like friends. But as soon as one of them leaves, the other starts to say bad things again...
...Imperial may simply be the elite's answer to the village barbershop, which has a time-honored role in Nicaraguan society as a place where ideas are exchanged, jokes are tested, names are smeared and rumors are born. All subject matter is open to discussion off the mirror, from politics and sports, to women and weather...
...Walking into a Nicaraguan barbershop is a bit like stepping back into the colonial era, and some of the equipment in use is not that much newer. My neighborhood barber gives me a straight-blade shave, proceeded by several rounds of ointments and creams, and then a full facial and head massages with some sort of ancient vibrating contraption that looks like a Thomas Edison prototype. I don't know what that thing is, but it keeps me going back...