Congratulations on Perfectly Coiffing Your Jew Fro!

Being a Jewish kid with a giant red fro is tough.  You get the Jewfro jokes, the stepchild jokes and, let’s face it: you’re small and skinny, which makes you a particularly enticing target in high school.  You could deal with all this, of course, with your stalwart Jewish durability, if not for one key factor in your life: you hate that you can’t make your hair do what you want.

Whatever you try, however hard you try, it just never holds. You simply cannot make your hair obey you.

Well, today the second least cool kid in the school, Sam, will walk up to you and hand you an afro pick.  Sam is black and, like you, he’s ostracized for being different.  Like you, he also has trouble getting his hair to fall in line.  He’ll hand you his pick and say “It gets better,” to you before he retreats to the library, where he’ll eat his lunch hidden deep in the stacks, surrounded by the books he tries to escape into each day.

You’ll secret the pick away, worried that the other kids at school will beat you up and take it away just to make a point about how terrible your life should be, but it won’t be necessary.  The rest of the day will go by uncharacteristically quietly, and when you arrive home you’ll be free to stand in front of the mirror with a clear head and begin picking at your fro to coif it into something wondrous.

Minutes will turn to an hour and before long your mother will burst into the bathroom uncomfortably, as if she expects you to be dead in the tub, or worse, masturbating.  When she sees you, and moreover your hair, she’ll laugh with relief.

“Oh, hey,” she’ll mumble as she walks up to you.  “You look so wonderful.”

You’ll catch sight of yourself in the mirror as she hugs you from behind and smile.  She’ll be right.  You will look pretty wonderful.

Congratulations on Perfectly Coiffing Your Jew Fro!