The only thing worse than your unemployed friend who's always borrowing money and eating the food at your apartment is your fabulous unemployed friend, the one who loses weight and befriends the idle rich and gets chic haircuts for free.

The New York Times is here to showcase the latter type of unemployed friend, in this article about a kindly Greenwich Village hairdresser who spent two days giving pro bono haircuts to fabulous laid-off fashion designers and other impoverished creatures:

Ms. Cheung, who was a lingerie designer until she was laid off four months ago, has not found the search to be all that easy. She has cut back on all the nonessentials: the dinners out, the fancy bread, the $200 cut-wash-dry-hot oil treatments of yore (alas, color and other services beyond the scissors were not free at the salon). She had not had even a trim since March, and those wispy ends of her long, dark hair were starting to get on her nerves.

Cristiano Cora usually charges $300 per cut, but on the weekend in question, all you needed was proof of unemployment and some can-do non-working-girl spunk:

Around the sleek, white room, the people who showed up for the event, held on Sunday and Monday, to have their hair done spoke of a common theme: change. "I'm trying to reinvent myself," said Carmen Ramirez, 39, a former fashion buyer from Washington Heights... She had not had her hair cut professionally for a year, and it had grown to her waist.

When Ms. Ramirez let down her long hair from the window in her lonely tower, Mr. Cora climbed to the top and slashed her long braid off and sold it at the wigmakers' black market. Her hair was so beautiful, they earned a small fortune by selling it, financing three whole years of funemployment for Carmen, plus an orphan he saw in a commercial on TV, and a school for girls in the impoverished nation of his choice. Happily ever after, the end.