Every once in a while, you're reminded that things aren't always what they seem. Case in point: the free haircuts at Durham Bulls' baseball games.

A few years ago, for a couple of seasons, the Bulls awarded a free haircut to two people selected from the crowd at every home game. Most minor-league baseball clubs do things like that, as if to make up for the fact that you're not watching major league baseball. So because the Bulls can't provide that major-league atmosphere -- surly, overpaid players, high prices and bad seats -- they stick to the silly stuff: contests, games and a giant humanoid bull who does wacky, mascot-type things like making fun of bald guys.

And they give away haircuts.

Here's how it works: Before the game's first pitch, the stadium announcer declares that the first four people to appear at a certain spot will be eligible for a free haircut. The four people -- they're children about half the time -- are then taken out to the field, with two of them being parked along the third-base line and two along the first base line. At the appointed moment, the crowd cheers for one pair of them, then the other. The pair getting the loudest cheer gets haircuts in the team owner's box.

Here's the question posed by a reader: This is fun?

"Do your kids get off on haircuts?" he wrote. "Here are kids who have been brought out for a night of fun at the ballpark, and now they have to take two or three innings out to go get a damn haircut ... There's just such irony in a kid going out to a ball game and winding up with a shroud around him and getting yanked on and being told to sit still."

The answer seemed evident at first. A haircut is rarely fun, and certainly not when it interrupts a baseball game.

But seeing and talking are the enemies of snap judgments. If you want to ruin the theory that baseball haircuts are no fun, do two things. Visit the Durham Bulls Athletic Park to see where the haircuts happen; and talk to Kristy Mitchell, who does them.

Most haircuts tend to occur in scenically challenged settings -- strip malls, mostly, or maybe in the shed with Mom wielding the clippers. But a haircut at a Bulls game means settling into an antique barber chair in a luxury box above home plate. A huge window offers an unimpaired view of the field. A pool table sits just over to the right, for those idle moments between innings. Food may be available at the serving counter to the left. Sometimes a guy with a video camera shows up, and you'll see yourself on the live-action billboard in the outfield. Wave to everyone, big shot. You'll never be in another barbershop like this.

Then there's Kristy, who is -- and one treads carefully here, lest the wrong word invoke a bad reaction from the new puritans -- exactly the person you would want cutting your 16-year-old, visible-to-girls, needs-to-look-good hair.

Kristy has cut the hair of every set of winners since the contest began last year. That's about 140 games so far. She also offers a trim to anyone else who happens to be hanging around the owner's box on game nights. And she cuts hair for the Bulls players, some of whom reportedly show up more often than good grooming actually dictates.

In fact, I wouldn't mind letting Kristy cut my hair. Now that I've investigated the matter, I can answer my reader's question.

Yes, this is fun.