I was reading the Bozeman Comical (ooops, I mean Chronicle) Sunday afternoon, when a little article caught my attention. A Florida woman believes that she holds the record for World's Longest Dreadlocks. At eight feet, nine inches, her dreads may be strong enough to lift a tiny prince into a tower, but they're not nearly long enough to reach him on the ground.
Too bad, because taking care of such a head of hair isn't easy. Her locks require a bottle of shampoo and conditioner each and every time she washes her hair, which isn't often. "I used to wash it three times a week. Now I do it once a week. It's very tiring," Asha Mandela says, "Sometimes I don't have the energy." When she does wash her hair, it's an all-day affair. She wrings out her eight feet of hair and must wait hours, sometimes days, for it to dry completely. "I try not to have any errands that day," she laughs. With that much hair, Mandela must find creative uses for her hair like cradling it in her arms like a baby, or using it as a neck scarf. I bet her prince could use it as a pillow or a blanket when she steals his covers in bed!
There is even a "revisionist" (as if there is such a thing as revising a fairytale) production of Rapunzel playing in the New Victory Theater in Manhattan. In this version, the heroine sports long, dark dreadlocks after being locked away by an herbalist Mother Goethel. At one point the modern Rapunzel yells at her Prince, “Don’t pull my hair!” in an nod to the misplaced concreteness that often creeps into modernized fairy tales.
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