A bead sliding, under the sole influence of its own weight, on a rigid wire shaped in the fashion of a plane curve, will describe (generally anharmonic) oscillations around a local minimum. For given shapes, the bead will behave as a harmonic oscillator in the whole range, such as an unforced, undamped, Duffing oscillator, etc. We also present cases in which the effective potential acting on the bead is not analytical around a minimum. The small oscillation approximation cannot be applied to such pathological cases. Nonetheless, these latter instances are studied with other standard techniques. (Contains 3 footnotes and 8 figures.)