And Here I Am Paying to Get My Hair Cut Like a Sucker

A schoolboy whose afro hairstyle grew so big he required hospital treatment for head pain has shaved it off in aid of charity.

John Sterlin Browne, 14, a pupil at Tynecastle High School, had his head shorn in the school gym hall at lunchtime to the cheers of hundreds of fellow pupils.

The Ghanaian-born teenager had been cultivating his afro for the past three years and his mum styled it fortnightly in fashionable corn rows. But combing his hair was so agonising that it regularly took his mum more than two hours whilst John bit on a piece of wood to cope with the pain.

I grew my hair out into a Monster Afro for my 7th-grade class picture, and, like this kid, I did it with the aid of cornrows.

Sweet Jebus! It hurt, but it was worth it.

When the yearbook came out, there I was, "Biff Loman," with an afro so big you could hardly see my face, it was so small by comparison, the photographer having had to adjust the camera so much to fit my entire head into the frame. Everyone else in my class was recognizable, had normal sized faces, but not me, not Biff Loman. For that year, I was reduced to a billowing afro, a giant Q-Tip dipped in ink, a Cousin It for the Soul set. The only thing bigger than the 'fro was my smile.

But as I said, it hurt to get the cornrolls put in every weekend, so as soon as I took the picture. I had my hair cut down to a respectable length.

Good times, good times.