In high school, my homeroom teacher was a Math Teacher named Mr. Hester. During my 11th grade “wild” period, I would come to school with a different hairstyle every day (wayyyy before black girls started doing it!). I would get up an hour early to use an entire can of mousse and hairspray to get my naturally curly hair to do abnormal things.

The first person to see these creations every day was my homeroom teacher. He would never fail to make a comment, and looking back on it, he was quite funny.

One day, he said my hair looked like someone threw a cherry bomb in it.

Once, when I had it all slicked back, I decided to put some grey make-up on the sides to look like temple greying. Hester told me that it looked like a bird had taken a dump in my hair.

I had another teacher that couldn’t look you in the eyes, she would always look over your head, so I gave her something to look at.

Once, I had some brown yarn left over from making a Boy George wig, so I crocheted (sp?) about 5 pieces of it into short (8 inch) strands, and tied them to a loop of yarn that I put around my head. So these pieces just kind of hung down from underneath my own hair. If I had known about weaves and tracks then, they would have seen a totally different me. What’s funny is that people actually remember that! They ask about it, and I thought it was just something to do.

One of my former best friends said that that was the day she first saw me in school. She told me that she said to herself that she had to find out who I was. (She was “crazy”, too)

My U.S. history teacher just looked at my hair sometimes and laughed. In her class, the person that sat directly in front of me was Janine Lackey. She used a can of hairspray every morning as well. One time, I had my head down on my desk (with big poofy hair) and she leaned her head back and our hair stuck together! We both failed that class. BUT, we both hated the teacher. (by the way, I aced it under a different teacher-me-in summer school)

I took it all in stride.