When I was kid, I hated everything about the barbershop: the leathery-handed old men who treated my head like a joystick; the Ginsu-sharp clippers that extracted hair (and sometimes flesh); the cringe-inducing post-cut alcohol swab. As an adult, however, I enjoy haircuts, largely because few places are as fun, entertaining and edifying as the barbershop.

If church is where African-Americans go for salvation, the barbershop is where we go for communion of a different sort. Come for the cut (or shave), but stay for the experience: the jokes, gossip and sh*t-talking, the characters, kinship and the sense that you can express yourself without fear of reprisal from a boss, a colleague or society.

Black barbershops have been around for more than 150 years, first serving only white men, but today’s shops boast clienteles spanning all races and have inspired books (Cutting Along the Color Line; Barbershops, Bibles and BET) and movies (the commercially successful Ice Cube-produced Barbershop franchise).

As a kid, much of what I learned about the adult world I learned in black barbershops. Both the bad—double lives of community leaders, growing problems with gangs in Las Vegas, the racism that led the city to be called “Mississippi of the West”—and the good: barbershops as vehicles for economic empowerment, places where ex-felons can make an honest living and mechanisms for bringing people together.

Everyone gets haircuts, so barbershops naturally spark those collisions Tony Hsieh talks about, the unique social interplay that occurs when different types of people interact. In shops across the country and around town, I’ve seen pastors, politicians and generations of families waiting for haircuts alongside athletes and entertainers, thugs and drug dealers.

I met my first celebrity in a barbershop: mid-’90s at Hair Unlimited in West Las Vegas, an in-his-prime Mike Tyson stopped in for a cut and conversation. The first entrepreneur I knew opened a barbershop (my cousin).

In barbershops, I’ve participated in high-minded intellectual debates and endured umpteen stories about baby mama (and baby daddy) drama. I’ve heard war stories from the streets of Iraq to the streets of Compton. I’ve watched some boys grow up and go off to college and some go off to prison. I’ve seen more women become barbers and earn respect.

One of my greatest joys now is taking my first-grade son to the barbershop. As a toddler, he hated it as much as I did. Now, he looks forward to his visits because after his haircut, he says, “All the women tell me I’m so handsome.”