Hair DON'T?

I don't wear my hair curly all that often anymore. I prefer it straight, and now that I have a high-octane flamethrower of a hairdryer, it's easy to get it that way - and fast.

Last nite, though, I was too tired to dry my hair after I washed it. Knowing I wouldn't have time to wash it again before leaving for Furman this morning, I decided to let it air dry over nite and see what happened.

The resulting, poodle-like coiffure prompted the following exchange with one Mr. Frederick Bear as I went in to get his sweet self out of bed. He looked up at me with eyes that were barely opened. His first words were: "Hey, Mama. How you get that hair on?" as if my head held some sort of kinky, curly hair hat that I had put on like Freddie puts on his Kentucky Wildcat football uniform.

When I told him that this is how God made me, he said, "Wear that hair to the Chocolate Beach" (he calls Pawleys Island "the Chocolate Beach," because the beach house is brown. I *think* he made this connection, because there's a picture of our family in the den. In it, Freddie is six months old, and my hair is curly).  He then yelled at Jones, saying, "Hey, JoJo! Come see Mama's hair."

I suddenly understood why P.T. Barnum made such a good living selling tickets for folks to see the freaks.

Before they went back to bed tonite, Jones came to me and said, "Mama, when you are asleep, do it like you do it at Mayme's house." Confused, I stuttered around for a minute until I got an idea of what he was talking about. "Like curly hair?" I asked. He confirmed: "Like curly hair. Like CRAZY hair," and then he ran down the hallway, yelling, "Guess what, Freddie! Tomorrow, Mama is gonna have that curly hair!"

For the record, I'm totally NOT.