Editor’s Note: The Orange Times Two Guys columnist Vincet Farricielli was recently profiled in the March 5 New Haven Daily Nutmeg Up In Years. Here is the complete text of that interview. Congratulations Vincent!{{more}}
Vincent Farricielli of Orange is a colorful guy, and not just because he started his career as a hair stylist and colorist before even graduating from high school.
His first job was at the old Malley’s on Chapel Street in New Haven. Soon he had his name over the door of his own salon, V. Farricielli’s Hair and Skin Studio. For more than forty years, he expanded his hairdressing concern into a full spa and hair salon, an “oasis” with 19 hairdressers on Whitney Avenue in Hamden as well as a second salon on Crown Street in New Haven. Along the way, he was appointed a member of the National Hairdressers Association; was a styling instructor in both the United States and Europe; went to Atlantic City for the Miss America pageant for 13 years to attend to the makeup, hair and other grooming for Miss Connecticut; and devoted 22 years to holding extravagant fashion shows and entertainment galas at the Shubert Theatre, raising money for the Juvenile Diabetes Association and for AIDS Project New Haven.
Farricielli has received a total of 42 official awards and honors, including two Connecticut Man of the Year Awards from the National Hairdressers and Cosmetology Association (in 1992 and 1994), induction into the National Cosmetology and Hairstyling Hall of Fame (in 1997) and the Dorothy Award from the New Haven Pride Center (in 2007).
A year after retiring, he says, he went to the doctor and said, “’There’s something really wrong with me.’” After a checkup, the doc diagnosed him with boredom and told him to “’go get a job or three.’”
Farricielli did just that, first working part-time as a color consultant for a firm in Darien. Now he cuts and colors two days a week at Georgina’s Hair Studio in Orange and also serves as a Justice of the Peace, performing weddings on the water, in gazebos and even in his own dining room. He requests that happy couples make donations to AIDS Project in lieu of paying him to preside.
A longtime clarinet and saxophone player, he is now following in Liberace’s footsteps and taking piano lessons. A year ago while doing a customer’s hair, a newspaper editor by chance, he was invited with his long time partner Robert Modena to write a food column. Now he and Robert write one every three weeks, under the moniker “Two Guys,” for the Orange Times. At age 75, Vincent Farricielli hardly seems retired at all.
Who needs a gold watch for telling time when the years are already golden?
Written by Bonnie Goldberg. Photograph, depicting seniors out and about at a HomeHaven Fun event in August 2013, taken by Judy Sirota Rosenthal.