Word: chaired
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...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...
...Once seated comfortably in the red-cushioned barber's chair, even the most powerful member of the elite becomes just another guy in need of grooming. And it's a common-man experience whose relaxed intimacy most of them seem to relish. "They come in and gossip and joke around," says the 61-year-old Rodr?guez, as he deftly moves a straight blade around the ears of a lesser-known patron. "The politicians want to know what other people say about them, and what they say about others...
...gunned down by unknown shooters in January 1978, the leading suspect - one of Larios' clients - told the police he had been getting a haircut at the Imperial Barbershop at the time of the murder. Larios later had to testify that the suspect had not in fact been in his chair that...
...Unless served a summons, however, Larios and Rodriguez prefer to respect barber-client privilege, especially with their bigger clients - the ones who have outgrown the chair, so to speak. Arnoldo Alem?n, the portly former president convicted on embezzlement charges, now sends a car and driver to fetch Rodr?guez to do a home haircut, for which the barber charges double, or $9. Miguel Obando y Bravo, who used to come into the shop when he was just Archbishop of Managua, started sending the car after the Pope named him cardinal...
...build up a confidence with the clients," Rodriguez says, politely declining to discuss any of the really juicy tidbits that have been entrusted to him from the barber's chair over the years. "You hear so much, it's hard to remember everything they say," he adds diplomatically, with a revealing twinkle in his eye. In fact, the reason his clients feel so free to express themselves may be that the whatever they say is carefully swept up with the hair clippings and discarded...