Refurbished Children's Stories: Rapunzel and the Really Bad Hair Day

When fairy tales were in fashion, before true love was rare, A prince wooed a maid who was flaxen and fair. He came every day and patiently knelt Before the dark tower wherein his love dwelt. He'd call out, "Rapunzel, oh, show me you care, And let down a ladder of your golden hair." This scene re-enacted for forty long years, His plaintive pleas ever falling upon unheeding ears. But one winter's day, very bitter and cold, The prince puzzled to fathom what his eyes did behold. Overnight, it appeared, her hair came unbound And the tresses lay scattered all over the ground. As he gazed at those sad locks, his poor heart was torn, Was his loved one now bald, her long hair shortly shorn? Then the prince felt a chill shoot right down to his boots, He perceived that the gold was quite black at the roots. Suddenly down came a note in a filigreed cup, "I can't hear the doorbell, so just come on up." "Are you freaking kidding me?" he cried, quite beside himself. "My perfect Rapunzel is bald-headed…and deaf?" Much chagrined, he charged in, but the higher he climbed, His ire waned at the prospect of the treasure he'd find. He opined she'd be virtuous, angelic, demure, But then he stopped dead in his tracks at the door. The crone he encountered at the top of the stair Was morbidly fat, and far, far from fair. The prince blanched at the warts and stiff hairs on her chin, As she lewdly, and nudely, gestured him in. She lay draped on a bed wearing only a smile, But a true prince is immune to lascivious wiles. While most heroes in such tales are stalwart and stout, This one raced to the casement and flung himself out. As he plunged to his doom from that horrible room, And ever nearer beneath him he watched the earth loom, The prince yelled as he fell, shook his fist, and he cursed, "Why the heck didn't I vet her on Angie's List first?"