The neighborhood spot: Cutting hair and cutting up at the barbershop, onscreen and off

It's about 3 p.m. on a Friday at The Lavish Lounge Cutz & Stylz, where the Fade Doctor and his crew are winding down the week. Closing time nears, but this South Dallas barbershop and beauty salon is still snapping with verbal energy.

You might recognize that energy from the movies. Barbershop: The Next Cut is the third installment in the popular Ice Cube franchise about the stylists and clientele of a South Side Chicago barbershop. The movies find some room for dramatic topics, from urban gentrification to gang violence. You'll also see some tight fades and comical follicle errors. But these films are more about cutting up than cutting hair. Here, the barbershop is a sanctuary for saying what you think and a nonstop verbal party.

Can a barbershop really be that much fun? Well, yes. In need of both a haircut and a story angle, I paid a visit to Lavish Lounge on the recommendation of Donovan Lewis, a Twitter buddy and radio personality at The Ticket. Fade Doctor, who also goes by Eric Turner and E.T., does indeed have a fade, with a touch of gray, and a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper goatee. He was holding court, alongside stylists Ms. Toya and Twine.

The banter was constant, bouncing between the travails of kids in school to the fate of Big Bundy on A&E's true crime series The First 48 (which blared from the TV on the wall), and several points in between. Laughter rarely ceased. "That fade is so tight the price just went up," Fade Doctor tells a client in his chair. A man walks in and greets Fade Doctor - "What's up, greatest barber ever?" - chats for a few minutes and leaves. Ms. Toya engages in verbal jousting with Twine, who wants to know if the guy from the newspaper can score free tickets for The Next Cut. As Ms. Toya concentrates on the fade at hand - which happens to be mine - and answers her client's questions, Twine interjects a comment. Ms. Toya shushes him.

"You trying to embarrass me," Twine protests.

"You embarrass yourself," Ms. Toya responds. "Stay out my business."

Ice Cube, who stars in the Barbershop movies and produced the last two (as well as the short-lived TV series and the spin-off movie Beauty Shop), fondly remembers such exchanges. Before he was rich and famous enough to have his stylist come to his house, he soaked up the wit and wisdom of barbershops in his native Los Angeles.

"The barbershop is a sort of social club," Cube said during a recent stop in Dallas. "It's a place where you can always be heard. It's almost like a therapy session, or one of those support groups. The barbershop has been the unsung cubbyhole, the unsung jewel, in every community. It's also a place where you can get your self esteem right when you come out with a fresh cut."

That purpose has evolved over the years. As Quincy T. Mills writes in his 2013 book Cutting Along the Color Line: Black Barbers and Barbershops in America, nineteenth-century black barbers faced a social stigma because they were obliged to serve an exclusively white clientele. Only in the twentieth century did the black barbershop become a social hub where cutters and clients alike could revel in the joy of saying anything.

Fade Doctor, who was born and raised in Oak Cliff and does a little computer repair on the side, says sports are a primary conversation topic, especially the Cowboys. They also talk politics a lot.

"We talk about Donald Trump, as in how can anyone vote for him?" he says. "That's just a joke. When we talk politics we don't care who you vote for, as long as you vote."

"Why you telling that man fibs?" Ms. Toya chimes in.

Fade Doctor may have clippers game, but Ms. Toya can give him a run for his money. I leave Lavish Lounge with an impressively precise fade (my standard two on top, one on the sides).

Twine is impressed.

"She gave you a tight cut," he says. "You're gonna get all the sisters now."

Cube was correct. I have a fresh cut. And my self -esteem is right.