“A blonde went to buy a Pizza and after ordering, the assistant asked the blonde if she would like her pizza cut into six pieces or twelve.

“Six please” she said, “I could never eat twelve!”

I have blonde hair and I always have…well, except for a couple of misguided attempts to not have blonde hair.

As I’ve gotten older and had babies, I’ve had to work a little harder and pay a little more to maintain my blonde hair, which has now faded into a rather unfortunate dishwater color.

But I didn’t come here to talk about hair.

Why do we make fun of blondes?  What is it about the light hair that leads us to assume blondes have an inferior sense of common sense?  I mean, we fair headed types are the salt of the Earth, right?  We hide our intellect beneath a mask of gold.

Okay, let’s not judge every blonde on that sweet little girl. Bless her heart…

When I was 15, first learning to drive, my friend Aaron told me that all stop signs that were outlined in white were optional.

“As long as no one else is coming, you can drive right through,” he said with a smile.

Later that week, as my mom and I practiced driving, I buzzed through a stop sign after ensuring that no one else was coming. I was very safety conscious, you see.

“What are you doing?!” My mom screeched, to which I responded with a dramatic eye roll and the sigh that revealed my obvious superior knowledge.

“It’s optional, Mom,” I said. “It was outlined in white.”

*pause*

“Kelli, all stop signs are outlined in white.”

Okay, so look – I could see where one might want to blame that error in judgment on my hair color, but I prefer to blame it on youth. And on the fact that my friend Aaron was a terrible practical joker.

That same year I went on my first trip to the former Soviet Union, to Minsk, Belarus. One day, while speaking with a classroom of students about American traditions, I tried to explain Thanksgiving.

“Thanksgiving,” I began, “is when Americans gather together to…um…you know…celebrate the pilgrims…uh…like, landing on Earth.”

And I moved on, completely unaware of the fact that our trip leaders were in the back of the room clutching their sides, they were laughing so hard.

Okay, so fifteen was a bad year for me. But it wasn’t my hair…I swear it!

I was in college, riding in the back of a friend’s car as she stopped for gas. “Cars are the strangest things,” I told her when she got back in the car. “I think the gas tank in my car must expand and shrink with the weather because sometimes it costs $25.00 to fill up my tank and other times it only costs $19 or $20.”

*pause*

“Um,” she said politely, because she was very kind, “that’s probably because gas prices fluctuate, not the size of your tank.”

Okay, so I was older at the time, but my hair wasn’t a factor in that little faux pas.

We visited a church a couple of weeks ago. At the end of the service, the pastor brought up two people who would soon be leaving on short term mission trips. Pointing to the gentleman the pastor said, “And this young man will be leaving on Monday for the Amazon where he and a team of others will be traveling to a remote area to help hand-dig a brand, new well.”

I looked at Lee and whispered, “They’re going to dig a well with their hands? How is that possible?”

*pause*

“Well, I assume they’ll probably have shovels,” he said, his eyes dancing.

“Oooohhh,” I whispered. “That makes more sense. I was picturing them on their hands and knees, scooping the dirt like dogs.”

And then we lost it. Inappropriate laughter through the pastor’s closing prayer and a quick and hasty exit so we wouldn’t have to look anyone in the eye.

*sigh*

Let’s not use the moniker “dumb blonde,” m’kay? I like to gently refer to those times as blonde moments…