CoraBeth's Business Venture

We are told that the spare room at Ike's has served many purposes. Over the years it has been a game room, a study, a sewing room, and a beauty parlour.

It was here, in her beauty parlour, that Olivia asked Cora Beth for a permanent wave, when she was feeling restless in The Rebellion. Olivia said that she needed a change, and a change she did, indeed get.

When Esther smells something burning in the back of Ike's store, goes to investigate and finds that it is Olivia with perming rods sticking out all over her head with wires attached everywhere, all she can say is "Good Lord".

After taking the rods out, Olivia looks in the mirror and coments in horror that she now has "smelly little bed springs" all over her head. At home, Elizabeth and Erin begin laughing at her, whilst Elizabeth tells her she looks like Shirley Temple now, causing Olivia to run out of the house with a scarf around her head. She runs into Mary Ellen who also laughs.

As for John, he tells her that her hair was the one thing he asked her not to change. Couldn't she have changed her dress or her shoes…anything but her hair? Finally Olivia approaches Verdie in the hope that she might know how to straighten frizzy hair. Olivia has heard that Verdie's people have a recipe for straightening hair. Verdie's answer, however, is to wrap it all up in a pretty turban until it grows out!

The goodnight sequence here is quite funny with Elizabeth telling her mother that John Boy says that there are four different types of hair. John Boy dutifully continues that there are indeed four different kinds of human hair:

• Short and crisp.
• Straight and lank.
• Long and coarse, wavy and curly.
• And a special fourth kind called frizzy.

John calls out to the children that their mother can no longer hear them as she has her head under the covers. Elizabeth calls out "Goodnight Mama" to which John replies "Frizzy says Goodnight".