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"We left the funeral potatoes in the car," David Kranes quips to Brenda Sue Cowley before getting his final haircut this week at the Ninth Avenue Salon.

"The usual, Dr. Kranes?" the salon owner asks the playwright as she drapes a cape around his shoulders. "Yes, the Brutus," he says, as Cowley starts snipping.

For Cowley, every regular haircut sparks another memory and a fresh set of tears. "I see everyone who comes into the shop more than I see my friends," she says.

Around her, the salon's original Anna Bliss paintings are gone, having already found new homes. Instead, customers have written goodbyes with chalk on the bare light-green walls, one even adopting the tone of notes scrawled in a high-school yearbook. "Had so much fun with you in homeroom."

The closing of another neighborhood institution feels like serious business, no matter how common an occurrence it might be in 21st-century America. Yet the closing of this place, once known as the Vista View Beauty Parlor, might feel like something of a fresh cut to regulars.

Friends are invited to stop by to say goodbye on Saturday from 9 a.m. to midafternoon. Just mentioning the salon's final open house prompts another round of tears from Cowley. "Goodbyes are the hardest part," she says. "So many people just believed this place would be here forever."

Ninth Avenue was the kind of place where everybody deserved a haircut, even if they didn't have enough money to pay downtown salon prices. "We took chickens and vegetables — we didn't care," Cowley laughs, before adding: "I've really taken eggs."

For 35 of those years, Ninth Avenue was the stage for the irrepressible Michael Adamson, the previous owner who filled the place with his quiet, yet oversized personality. Some customers were so loyal they never went anywhere else.

Regulars were used to his pranks, such as the farting machine he'd set off with a remote control or the plastic buttocks he donned to moon customers.

Through the years, he worked with artists at local theater and dance companies, and specialized in styling wigs for characters. That's why it seems appropriate that the salon's chairs and stations will find a new home at Logan's Utah Festival Opera and Musical Theatre.

Cowley, an actor and writer, memorialized the spirit of the style-and-set neighborhood salon in a musical comedy, "Shear Luck," which premiered at the Grand Theater in 2006. Each draft of her script was dedicated the same way: "For Michael, of course."

"I've been obsessed with this shop and the people who come here," she says, referring to her unfinished draft of a romance novel set at the salon.

Back then, she thought she had retired from hairstyling. But she returned to Ninth Avenue to help out after Adamson's sudden death. At the time, some customers thought Adamson was just pulling another one of his tricks.

Cowley thought she was making a months-long commitment when she stepped in to run the place. Her stint stretched to seven years. It took a village to keep the place open, she says.

But the sale of the Ninth Avenue building caused her to reconsider the burdens of running a business. Now a serious family illness is prompting her and her husband to temporarily visit Missouri.

"For the past seven years, I've had a work environment where I've said 'I love you' and heard 'I love you' everyday," Cowley says. "It's hard to leave that."

On Wednesday, she cried as she accepted a hug from a former partner in style, Melissa Sevy, who dropped in with a bouquet and plenty of shared memories.

At 18, Sevy says, she considered herself a country girl from Cache Valley when she first applied for a job at Ninth Avenue. She was intimidated by Adamson, who she thought "was fancy." "Little did I know," she laughs, recounting her 10-year stint working at the shop.

Over the years, Adamson watched the stylist grow up, even helping her husband stage a marriage proposal. When she got married in the LDS Church's Salt Lake Temple, Adamson joked that she should leave the back door open so he could slip in and watch.

When she and her husband parented foster children, Adamson set up a tip jar to fund illegal tactics that, if needed, would help keep those children in the family. Sevy and her husband went on to adopt those three children, and two more, within two years.

For a time, Sevy and her family planned to buy the salon and live downstairs, but business arrangements didn't work out. Now she works for the Davis School District and cuts hair on the side.

Those tangled plans didn't complicate her emotions at the prospect of the final chapter of the Ninth Avenue Salon.

"I was very lucky to have been a part of this," Sevy says, as Cowley focuses on another last cut.

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