Is You Okay? (4 page)

NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!

I tried comforting Patrice while my mom went back into her bag of tricks. I offered her something to drink, and suggested
running a cold bath, or using an ice pack. Poor Patrice didn't want any of it. She was too disoriented from the pain and the fatigue. She was probably dehydrated, too, now that I think about it. She just sat there in the tub waiting for my mom to return with her new solution.

Want to guess what my mom came into the bathroom with? Take all the time you need, I can wait.

If you guessed a loaf of white bread and a jar of Miracle Whip, you should run out and play the lottery right now because you are a genius.

White bread and Miracle Whip—this was not the kind of miracle either of us were hoping for. Before I could protest—actually, before I could even register what was going on—my mom was plopping globs of mayonnaise onto Patrice's skin with her fingers. She didn't want to use a knife or a spoon—she'd learned her lesson from the Dr. Almont incident earlier that same year—so instead she used the slices of white bread to spread the Miracle Whip into a nice even coat.

My mother had gone from turning my best friend into a burrito to turning her into a sandwich.

If you told me at any point in the next thirty years of my life that this wouldn't be the weirdest thing I'd ever be involved with in a bathtub, I'd have given you all the change in my
piggy bank. Fast-forward to my Cereal Challenge video, eating Froot Loops out of a bathtub filled with water and skim milk. You'd be shocked what can find its way into a black bathing suit (twelve million views, for example).

But all that was to come. Back then, as bad as I felt for Patrice in that moment, I felt worse for myself. I was already the only black girl in our class; now I would be the girl whose mom tortures kids by marinating them in the bathtub and then turning them into Lunchables.

Shockingly, Patrice wanted to go home after her Miracle Whip makeover. When you feel as miserable as she looked, all you want is your mother and your own bed. I understood, but I still begged her to stay and to come to church with us in the morning. We could still salvage the weekend, I was sure of it; we could still have fun. Maybe Jesus could help!

Patrice, the saint that she was, gave in.

At church the next morning, Patrice was uncomfortable in more ways than one. Not only was she exhausted and sunburned bright red, but she was also the only white girl in a church full of black people. It was like the setup to a corny joke: What's black and white and red all over? Church with my best friend, the candy cane flamingo.

I'd been going to this church since I was a baby, and to the Presbyterian school church since I was in kindergarten, but having Patrice there with me at my home church was the first time I really recognized that I was in an all-black congregation. This was a different world from the one my classmates belonged to.

The pastor opened our service by saying, “Welcome to the Mt. Olive African Methodist Episcopal Church at 2525 West Church Street. Where Church Street ends and church begins!” He said it every Sunday like it was a new joke. (I don't think Patrice got it, but then, she had other things on her mind, like how she was turning into a giant blister.) We used the same King James Bible and sang from hymnals with many of the same songs as other churches, but nothing sounded the same. “Amazing Grace” was an entirely different song depending on where it was being sung. At school, it was the length of a TV commercial break; at Mt. Olive, it lasted as long as a full TV show. Four minutes barely got you through the intro by the organist. As uncomfortable as she was, I think Patrice got a real taste that day for what my experience at Calvary Presbyterian School was like every day. Watching her try to keep up with the choir, and constantly lose her place, really hammered home both the differences and the similarities in our situation. All the clapping didn't help either—not because she had no rhythm, because the sunburn made each clap hurt.

That poor girl: rubbing alcohol, mayonnaise, white bread, the Holy Spirit. Nothing seemed to help.

Ultimately, I was right about what was going to happen after that weekend. Patrice told some of the kids at school about our sleepover—not in a mean way, just in the way you do when you're in middle school. The story got around and naturally got blown out of proportion, kids teased me about it unmercifully, and no one slept over at my house again. After we graduated at the end of eighth grade, Patrice and I went to different high schools and I never saw her again during my school years.

But can you imagine if this all happened today? One of us would have grabbed our phone and Snapped it or vlogged it. My mom might be one of those frantic people interviewed on the news, like Antoine Dodson (“Hide your kids! Hide your wife!”), or Sweet Brown (“Oh, Lord Jesus, it's a fire! Ain't nobody got time for that!”). It could have kicked off an entire set of memes. Patrice might have been as famous as the Star Wars Kid or the “Leave Britney Alone” guy. It's crazy to think how so much has changed since then, to the point where things get turned into viral videos the second they happen.

A couple of years ago, I did a meet and greet at the very same church in Orlando where I spent my childhood. The place was full of old friends and new fans—it was hard to keep track of everybody. Then a woman walked up to me smiling, carrying an adorable little boy.

It was Patrice. After we hugged and squealed our hellos like we were right back in sixth grade, the first thing she said was, “Remember that time your mom covered me in mayonnaise and white bread?” And we both laughed hysterically.

We talked for a while that day and I learned a lot. While I had tried to put the embarrassing sleepover incident behind me, she'd never forgotten about it . . . or me. I'd stuck in her memory, no matter where life took her. I asked her why she thought that was, but she didn't have an answer.

I think it's because when you're different, you're memorable. If you're a little white girl in Florida, going to a predominately white school, how do you forget the only little black girl in your class? Especially when her mom covered you in rubbing alcohol and mayonnaise in the middle of the night.

That's the great part about being different—it makes you kind of unforgettable. It can be tough early on—trust me,
I understand
—but once you embrace what truly makes you different and unique, it not only allows you to carve out a space for yourself in the world, but it helps you see how much
you actually have in common with other people. Sure, I was a different race from Patrice, but we were both from Orlando, we went to the same school, and had the same teacher; we both loved the water park; and we both thought my mom was diff-UH-rent! That's a lot to bond over for two people whose lives went in such different directions. And it helps explain why we were able to pick up right where we left off, there in that old church.

If Patrice taught me anything in that moment, it was this: you should never run away from what makes you different. Don't try to round off all those edges that make you unique in order to fit into a mold that someone else created. The world is full of people trying to fit in. We don't need any more of those people. We need people like you, people who are a little bit different and have something special to say. That is the world I want to live in.

Just remember to use sunscreen.

     
Q:
  Is that really your hair? How many weaves do you have?

     
A:
  Yes, it really is my hair. I bought it fair and square. It's called a “weave” and I own, let me see . . . one, two, three . . . maybe seventy of them? I have a whole bag full. Which one I wear depends on the occasion or how I'm feeling. Some people think it's funny that I always wear a weave when I'm out in public or I'm doing a video, but hair is like any other accessory. It needs to be convenient, it needs to match your outfit, and it needs to look good when you're putting a bunch of crazy stuff in your mouth!

My dream of becoming an entertainer didn't start as a dream—instead, it developed over time as I tried to cope with all the ups and downs of being at a school where I was the different one.

I got through those first two decades of life in large part thanks to comedy shows like
The Carol Burnett Show
and
The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson
. They made me laugh, they made me happy, and they made me forget the tough parts of being different. Also, watching those shows I learned that being different could bring great benefits—these personalities were not like anyone else, and
they were on TV!
I watched those brilliant comedians do their stuff, and I thought about how they made me feel, and I said to myself:
That's what I want to do—I want to be in front of people and make them smile and be happy.

But I didn't know the first thing about how to actually become an entertainer. For a start, I had no real concept of the entertainment industry. All I knew was that whatever was happening on those shows happened in California.
The Carol Burnett Show
was “filmed in Hollywood in front of a live studio audience.”
The Tonight Show
was coming to me “from lovely downtown Burbank.” So that's where I needed to go—I'd figure out the rest once I got there. That's easier said than done when you're young and you live twenty-five
hundred miles away on the other side of the country, and more to the point: nobody on these hit TV shows even looks like you.

Fast-forward what feels like a lifetime, and standing up on the platform before the start of the Streamys preshow I had a similar sense, but in reverse. Watching the room full of beautiful YouTubers, Viners, and Snappers mingle, I couldn't help but notice how young they all were. Bright eyed, with smooth skin and perfect muscle tone, some of them were literally half my age. A few of them had been doing videos for literally half their lifetime.

So how did
I
get up here? It felt like only yesterday that I was the young girl in front of the TV, and now all of the sudden I'm
older
than everyone? How does that work?

A couple years ago, my paternal grandmother officially turned one hundred years old. Unofficially, I'm pretty sure she was older than that. We don't know the truth, because she wasn't born in a hospital.
Her
mother gave birth to my grandmother in a shack on the edge of a cotton field in southern Georgia in the 1910s, where stuff like birth certificates and exact dates weren't available to poor black
families like theirs. And in any case, their lives were mostly concerned with survival and trying to get by.

The whole age thing didn't seem to bother my grandmother, or at least I don't think it did. I didn't find out until I was a teenager that no one knew exactly how old she was, and you'd think if it were a big deal, someone would have worked it out for her. After we found out that no one knew, my sister and I were always curious what the real number was, but by then all the people who were around when she was born had passed away. My grandmother, for her part, just shrugged whenever we asked. Think about it—how was she supposed to know her age? She wasn't there before she was born. And besides, age is just a number. It didn't matter all that much. That was always her response.

It was a comforting thought as a teenager and then as a college student. This idea that it didn't matter how old you were, that there was still plenty of time to do . . . whatever. I needed that sense of relief the most back then, what with being in a high school that was even smaller (and whiter) than my grade school, and then going to a couple different colleges spread out over several years while I dealt with my dad's health problems (I'll tell you more about that next chapter). The urge to hurry up and spread my wings was strong as I flew through my teenage years, but the forces keeping me in the nest were stronger. There was nothing
I could do about it, and it had the potential to create real friction, but for my grandmother's words.

By the time I got to be the same age as many of my friends down in that Streamys audience, however, my opinions had changed. I thought her saying was nonsense. In my twenties, still in Florida, doing community theater, performing in the church choir, working at random places like Universal Studios, I had become obsessed with the idea that everything changed when you turned thirty—that's when all the fun stops and the exploration ends and you're supposed to get serious. By then you're supposed to know what you're going to do with the rest of your life.

But what if you didn't know? What if you hadn't figured out exactly what you wanted to do with your life by then? Or how to do it? Singing and playing piano with my church choir, doing local music theater, those were all forms of entertainment and ways of being an entertainer; but it didn't feel like enough because I didn't have a clear direction. I mean, I knew I wanted to make people happy, but which people and how? Those were the real questions, and I wasn't sure about their answers. As a result I felt like I was just spinning my wheels there in Florida during my twenties while everyone else was off to the races.

If your twenties are when you're supposed to figure out what you want to do, your thirties are when you're supposed to actually get down to doing it. When I turned thirty, still in Florida, I hadn't done one and I wasn't prepared for the other. Instead, I was worried about what would happen when I turned forty. If you watched TV from back when I was growing up or you listened to “the adults,” you'd understand why this was so important—according to them, life was over at forty. That's when you stop being pretty and have an “over the hill” birthday party where people bring black balloons and a cake shaped like a tombstone. If I listened to them, and I didn't quickly figure out all the stuff I was supposed to have learned in my twenties, and then spend the rest of my thirties making it happen, then by forty none of it would matter. My hopes, my dreams, my goals—all of it would be all over.

A lot had changed at the end of my twenties, however. My father passed away. I got married. I met a group of performers—we called our little theater group “Du-Plex”—with similar California dreams to mine. A real direction was starting to make itself known to me. I had every reason to leave the nest now, and the support I needed in case I fell.

Maybe the other old people's lives were on the verge of being over, but I didn't feel old at all. My skin looked great! I had a ton of energy, just like my grandmother, who was still cooking and cleaning, and she was probably ninety at
the time. Sixty years older than me. That's a whole other additional lifetime she'd been at it! Suddenly her words started to ring true again.

And that's when I realized: I had my whole life ahead of me. It's not about what I should have learned in my twenties or what I should have done in my thirties, it's about what I can do today and tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that. Your life, your dreams, whatever you're chasing doesn't need to be a hyperfocused vision from the get-go. That story you hear people tell, about how “all I ever wanted to be was a __________,” that's not really how the world works. Very few people have that kind of vision, and that is okay.

All I ever wanted to be
wasn't
a YouTuber.

YouTube didn't exist when I was younger. If you traveled back in time to when I was a kid and asked someone about “YouTube,” they'd probably think you were talking about the U-shaped pipe under the sink. My original dreams were basic: I just wanted to perform in front of people and make them happy. Having goals like that is a good thing. Feeling a pull in a particular direction is great. I just had to keep reminding myself:
You don't need to have it all figured out
.

When I think about it, that mindset shift is really what reconnected me to those simpler early childhood dreams and kicked me in the behind to get out to Los Angeles.
Get to California, you can figure out the rest once you get there.
The mindset shift also helped me through all the ups and downs over the rest of my thirties in a new city, with new friends, and a new direction. As a result, when forty came and went a couple years ago, I wasn't worried about fifty at all. I felt like I was twenty years old all over again.

I have my whole life ahead of me.

I guess MaDear was right about that whole age thing from the start. That's what we called my grandmother—“MaDear” (pronounced muh-DEAR), as in ‘Mother Dear'—because she raised eight kids in the projects, cooked and cleaned for seventy-five-plus years, and honestly that's what she wanted to be called, so that's what we did. You don't talk back or second-guess a strong woman like her. To MaDear, age was just a number because she didn't have much use for it, and she was too busy to think about it even if she had. Raising a big family, corralling a bunch of grandkids, and cleaning “for my white people,” as she liked to say, has a way of soaking up all your free time.

The way MaDear lived her life taught me a valuable lesson: thinking about your age, whether you feel too young or too
old, is a waste of time. It means you're spending too much time in the past on things you can't change, or too much time in the future on things that might never happen, when there is so much to focus on in the present. When you're not paying attention to the skillet on the stove, that's how you get burned. (Or worse, how you ruin the bacon.)