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They write some crazy stuff.

They write about stealing boots and shaving their heads all because they want to share it with friends, family, even the StoryCorps mobile recording studio when it parks next week in Winston-Salem for a month.

Or maybe, they simply want to share it with themselves, to echo the words of Peggy Christenbury, their classmate: "Yes, I was here.''

So they write.

For six weeks, they sit in a room at Greensboro's Christ United Methodist Church and listen to their teacher Sandra Redding, author of "Greensboro & Me: Dancing Through The Decades.''

For six weeks, they talk about first romance and first children.

For six weeks, they read, write and listen.

For six weeks, their lips quiver, their eyes tear and their folded-hand demeanor unwinds into a big body laugh.

Pauline Jones has been writing for only a few months. But after her trip to see the inauguration of Barack Obama, she wanted to write about it because she never thought she would witness something like that.

After all, Jones is 82, a black woman who came of age in the Jim Crow South. She had watched her father dragged out of her house and her uncle come home beaten because of the color of his skin.

So, she felt she had to go to D.C., to see the inauguration - even if it meant leaving Greensboro way before daybreak and having her son push her through from curb to curb in a wheelchair in a morning that was finger-numbing cold.

This week, she recorded what she saw. In longhand.

Mary Vick, 66, has been writing for a decade.

She's got a spiral-bound book, full of more than 60 stories. She calls her book "Close To The Fire'' because as the wife of a potter she knows how fire can make or break a creation.

Just like life.

After retiring as an educator, she began writing about almost everything - her dirty house, her barking dog Bandit, her adventures with husband Tom driving across America in their RV.

In Redding's six-week class, she shares her story about her advertiser dad and his dream to win a big-time writing award.

He didn't. He got struck down with Alzheimer's, and he could barely write his own name.

So, she writes. She wants to carry out what he couldn't.

Then there's Peggy Christenbury and Renie Jefferson, two best friends.

Jefferson, 75, a retired nurse, writes about her past. As a poor kid from Saluda, envious of anything fancy and nice, she stole her cousin's white majorette boots and threw them down the hole in her family's new outdoor privy.

She got caught. But her cousin never wore those boots again. You can probably guess why.

Christenbury, 61, who runs a machinery business with her husband, writes about her present. She shaved her head, and she heard her grandson Silas yell after upon seeing her bald, "Hat on, Nana! Hat on!''

Christenbury did it for Jefferson, the woman she calls "my sister.''

A few years back, Jefferson lost her red hair after chemotherapy killed the cancer that stole part of her lung.

Redding, who has taught writing for two decades, has a name for these quirky, poignant, funny details mined by her new students.

It's the details discovered by StoryCorps, the popular oral history project heard on National Public Radio - as well as her old students, who over the years, have said often: "I've never written anything, but I've got a great story in my head.''

Redding calls it "the core,'' these defining details of every day - of stealing boots, of shaving heads, of deciding on a whim to get into D.C., even in a wheelchair, to see history happen.

It's all about finding the core of who we are.

Warts and all.

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com