Barbershop

A city man was fatally shot about 2:30 a.m. yesterday inside Kristyles Barber Shop in the 400 block of W. Saratoga St., said police spokesman Sgt. Kevin Daniels. Daniels said Bernard Stepney, 19, of the 5500 block of Cedonia Ave. and his assailant had gotten into an altercation at another location minutes before the shooting. After Stepney went to the barbershop, a man shot him several times, then fled, running east on Saratoga Street. No one else was injured in the incident.

UNTIL JANUARY, Kenya Davis managed to dance around death. Someone tried to kill him on the front steps of his girlfriend's West Baltimore rowhouse Sept. 25, 2000, the day Davis finished one of his numerous stints in jail. Despite five shots being fired, Davis escaped without a scratch. His girlfriend, however, was wounded in her right foot. Apparently, her other boyfriend opposed the idea of Davis being back on the street and tried to express this with a gun. Davis dodged death at least one other time - on Jan. 2, 1997, inside a barbershop.

Twenty-seven years ago, Jack Watters was in Security Square Mall in Woodlawn waiting for his wife when he heard harmonizing voices singing barbershop music. The Heart of Maryland Chorus was practicing in a meeting room for a performance at the mall, and Watters - always intrigued by the a cappella music style - joined in. The group then invited him to perform with them. He agreed, forgetting about his wife, Rusty. "I'm in the middle of this group singing, when my wife looks up and sees me," said Watters, of Sykesville.

Twenty-seven years ago, Jack Watters was in Security Square Mall in Woodlawn waiting for his wife when he heard harmonizing voices singing barbershop music. The Heart of Maryland Chorus was practicing in a meeting room for a performance at the mall, and Watters - always intrigued by the a cappella music style - joined in. The group then invited him to perform with them. He agreed, forgetting about his wife, Rusty. "I'm in the middle of this group singing, when my wife looks up and sees me," said Watters, of Sykesville.

THIS YEAR THE quartets from the Harbor City Music Company are providing a foolproof way to surprise your significant other on Valentine's Day. For $40, the group will deliver a two-song singing telegram, a card and flowers. If the love of your life resides outside the Baltimore metro area, they will deliver the telegram by phone for $10 to $15, depending on the area. The Harbor City Music Company is a chorus of the Sweet Adeline's International. They make their home at Brooklyn Park's Chesapeake Center for Creative Arts, 194 Hammonds Lane.

IT'S HARD to stroll through Taylor's Antique Mall in downtown Ellicott City without finding something fascinating. For Angie Cornelison of Columbia, that "something fascinating" was an antique barber's chair, dating to the early 1900s. She loved it but hesitated because of the $900 price tag. Within a week, Cornelison decided she had to have the chair. She returned to Taylor's, only to find a "sold" sign on the item. Over the next seven months, every time Cornelison returned to Taylor's, she was taunted by the chair, still sitting there, still with the "sold" sign on it. Finally, Cornelison's friend Teal Beatty 'fessed up. She had purchased the chair and was giving it to Cornelison.

FOUR YEARS AGO, when Rose Swicegood decided she needed a weekly night out, she didn't join a book club, enroll in a class or sign up for a bowling league. Instead, the Glen Burnie mother stepped up to the microphone. Swicegood says she had little singing experience when she joined Arundelair, a women's chorus in Annapolis. Although she hadn't sung since high school and had never learned to read music, she had an important attribute: She can carry a tune. She was familiar with women's barbershop singing.

Enoch "Smitty" Smith stares out the window of the Paramount I barbershop on Pennsylvania Avenue's 2700 block. Bleakness gazes back. Broken malt liquor bottles pack a tiny park, and trash blankets the alley next to it. Drug addicts huddle. Rowhouses cry out for rehabilitation. RIP graffiti dots walls -- enshrining homicide victims. Adjacent to the barbershop, where Smith has cut hair for 10 years, a tree has grown out of a vacant city-owned storefront for at least a decade. Smith pruned it recently, hoping to reduce the leafy haven it provides for drug dealers when it rains.

"BARBERSHOP singing is like ice skating," says Nancy Harring, manager of the women's barbershop chorus Chesapeake Harmony. "You have to learn to do a single jump before you can try a double or a triple." That's why members of the 2-year-old organization - the subject of this column in March - are so excited about their ranking in the annual barbershop competition at Ocean City Convention Center. Chesapeake Harmony finished in 12th place among 21 choruses from Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey.

LONDON -- Andrew Kuipers wields a straight-edge razor across your steamed and lathered face like a knife skimming butter, and you know you're in tonsorial heaven at a place named Truefitt & Hill. This is not just any old barbershop. For men of a certain age and pedigree, some of whom have patronized the establishment for a half-century or more, this is the only place to go for a haircut, surrounded by all the trappings of gentle English elegance: worn leather seats, dark wooden moldings, polished mirrors and a whiff of jasmine in the air. Guinness World Records is due to designate Truefitt & Hill on Wednesday as "the oldest barbers' business in the world."