Please Don't Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes

by Phoebe Robinson

  Now, truth be told, the year and change since that joyful breakthrough hasn’t been smooth sailing. There are moments when I’m discouraged by how long it takes for me to do my hair. My wash and gos are still a mixed bag, but I’ve noticed marked improvement. And, from time to time, I’ll pine after soft, fluffy non-4C curls.

  Despite all this, for the first time in my entire life, I truly, madly, deeply (only I can take this very Black pride moment and white it up with a Savage Garden reference) love my hair. I love its pliability, that it represents the resiliency of my people. I love that when I look at it in the mirror, I can hear the voices of those from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries telling me that my tightly coiled hair is art and that my hair growing up, not down, is a sign of me connecting with the divine. These voices are starting to become as loud as the voices that told me my hair is something to be ashamed of. I’m not even religious, but the notion that my hair is in communion with the vibrations of the Universe brings me peace. Makes me feel full and special. That neither me nor my hair have to do anything other than just be.

  And on days when I forget all of this and revert back to old habits of being furious at my hair and calling it every name in the book, I accept that, too, because it’s all about the journey. So, nope, it’s no happy ending. In fact, it’s no ending at all, and thank God! I’m honored that every day I get to work through my shit and choose to recommit to loving my 4C hair in all its kinky, coily glory. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

  Acknowledgments

  Guys, why are we still here? The book is over. We laughed. We cried. We’ve come out of this more certain than ever that we are absolutely on the right side of history when it comes to outside clothes in our homes. Okay, maybe wisely not sitting on a Brooklinen duvet in outside clothes isn’t worthy of being recorded in the annals of history, but perhaps it should be! Anyway, I digress. The point is, haven’t I written more than enough words to meet my contractual obligaysh with this book? Why is there still more work to be done with this whole acknowledgments section? I mean, the people I love know that I love them, so do I actually need to do this? Can’t we all go home? Wait. One sec. Am being told by my publisher that it’s ignorant as fuck—their words, not mine; J/K, definitely my words—to end a book without doling out some thanks and gratitude. And now that I think about it, if British Baekoff has this same attitude when it comes to marriage vows and tries to pull this stunt at our wedding one day (we’re not engaged!) and stands at the altar in front of our loved ones and says, “You know I love you. Why do I need to say any of it in front of everyone? Isn’t putting on this tux and giving you a ring enough?” I will absolutely curb stomp his ankles in my Sophia Webster stilettos—I’m avail for a sponsorship deal!—and cuss him out. So, okay. Fine. It’s time to acknowledge some folks.

  As per usual, I’m starting with my parents, Phil and Octavia. Thank you for being amazing, funny, and terrible at FaceTime. It’s always sweet to watch the #TechnologyStruggle happen in real time. Hope I’m doing a better job of calling home more often. Breaking the workaholic habit is hard, but I’m trying. Love you!

  My brother and sister-in-law, PJ and Liz. You are phenomenal human beings. So smart, with incredible moral centers. Plus, you’re great parents to two of the most precocious and wonderful kids, Olivia and Trey. Can’t think of a better advertisement of your awesomeness than how they’re turning out to be. Love you!

  British Baekoff, you are the tea to my crumpets, the bangers to my mash, the toad in my hole. #BritishFoodBeWeirdSometimes. Anyway, thank you for all your support, love, grace, sense of humor, patience, and willingness to watch U2 concert DVDs with me when I need my spirits lifted. Dating an author while they’re writing a book is no easy feat, but you handled it with such aplomb. You are a steady and calm man and I’ve evolved exponentially as a person from being with you. Love you.

  Mai, you’ve been building this empire with me brick by brick from the beginning. I’m lucky to have you as my work wife. You challenge and support me in equal measure. Most of all, I love you more than you love me (lol), which is very on brand for our partnership. Your lack of effusiveness keeps me on my toes and makes me come back for more. Thank you for everything.

  Sam, you are the best publicist that anyone could ask for and your friendship is one of my favorite things in the world. Thank you for your unfiltered honesty and sense of humor. We lift each other up always and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

  Team Tiny Rep Productions—Jose and Camille, thank you for going on this journey with me. Working with you reminds me of why I got into Hollywood: to make dope shit, have fun, and create a show that has something to say that’ll resonate with others and make them feel seen. Thanks for lovingly dragging me when I make trash mom jokes.

  I can’t continue without shouting out my agent, Robert Guinsler. You believed in me when I was a little baby writer, just cranking out blog posts and freelance writing content. You saw what I was trying to do, fully believed in it, and have been on this journey with me for each of my three books. Thank you for your faith and for being my friend.

  Team Plume! I love all of you, clearly, because we keep doing books together. Thanks for backing me and Tiny Reparations Books. Special mention to Christine. Building this imprint with you has been enlightening, exciting, and another “e” I’m fresh out of energy to find because I’m weary as per usual. Anyway, we have something special going and I can’t wait to see what we do.

  My editor, Jill. Hey, boo! I missed every deadline LIKE WE KNEW I WOULD but I got it done. Thanks for joining me not only for this book, but also for the entire Tiny Rep Books journey. Your passion for what you do is infectious. I promise I’ll be on time with my next book. At Tiny Rep Books, I’d also like to thank Jamie Knapp in publicity, Alice Dalrymple in production editorial, and the marketing team of Stephanie Cooper, Natalie Church, Caroline Payne, and Tiffani Ren.

  I would be remiss if I didn’t thank my social media team aka Swim Social for everything you are doing to help build my career. Elena and Emily, you are so smart, funny, and talented. Thank you for saying Yes to the Dress and working with me.

  Glam Squad—Delina, Sabrina, Ryan. You keep me looking cute, youthful, and on trend. Thank you for making my dream of being a low-budget Zendaya a reality. Love you and the vibes you exude. I wish I could live in your energy forever.

  Next, I want to thank myself. Yep! I’m not going to fake humility and pretend that this book happened to me when I had to work my behind off in order to bring it into existence. Writing is too difficult a task to complete without self-belief and dogged determination. So I’m grateful for all the times I wanted to quit, but didn’t; all the times I found my groove and allowed myself to enjoy the process of writing; and all the times I decided to not compare myself to other authors and just put myself on the page. That’s hard to do.

  My friends—Karen, Nore, Michelle Buteau, Bono (he called me his friend once, so it would be rude not to mention him here. #IAmThirsty), Jamie Lee, Amy Aniobi, Jordan Carlos, Baron Vaughn, Vanessa Bayer, Neil Punsalan, Whitney Cummings, Jameela Jamil, Josh and Katya Sussman, Abby Sasser, Austin Channing Brown, Wanyi Zee, Hari Kondabolu, Milena Brown, Alex Richenbach, Beth McGregor, Alison Stauver, Kathy Iandoli, Emma Gray, Ilana Glazer, Abbi Jacobson, Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani, Jonathan Groff, and others I’ll kick myself for forgetting to mention. I’m grateful for all of you. You make my life full, and as we’re all getting older and we have to juggle the hecticness of our lives, I feel your presence daily and it helps me to keep going.

  Spotify and Apple Music—thank you for being the soundtrack I wrote to. Many a day when I felt like I couldn’t finish this book, you got me though with ’80s and ’90s R&B and pop playlists. Good looking out.

  About the Author

  Phoebe Robinson is a stand-up comedian, writer, producer, and actress. She is best known as the cocreator and costar of the hit WNYC Studios podcast 2 Dop
e Queens, which was turned into eight one-hour critically acclaimed HBO specials. She’s also the New York Times bestselling author of Everything’s Trash, But It’s Okay and You Can’t Touch My Hair: And Other Things I Still Have to Explain. Additionally, Phoebe was a staff writer on the final season of Portlandia, hosted the critically acclaimed podcast Sooo Many White Guys, and starred in the movies Ibiza and What Men Want. Most recently, she founded Tiny Reparations, a production company under ABC Studios. Tiny Rep’s first project, a talk show entitled Doing the Most with Phoebe Robinson, premiered in 2021 on Comedy Central.

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  * Lmao, Gloria Steinem and the ghost of Coretta Scott King are like, “What?” at me using the phrase “and all that jazz” to describe the tumultuous sixties. It’s ridiculous to summarize something major with a throwaway phrase. What if Maya Angelou wrote, “I know why the caged bird sings, yada, yada, yada”? People would be like, “Uhhhh, lady, you may know, but we still don’t, so care to elaborate?”

  * To my understanding, this is when you are hanging out. But there are no labels. Yet there is physical activity. However, it’s devoid of the respect and sensuality that existed back in the day when adults took lovers. So you just live in this gray area until one of you finds someone to actually date or one of you catches feels for the other, which effectively “ruins everything.” Right. This sounds dumb as hell. Thank goodness I’m off the streets because based on what relationships and dating have devolved into, if I’m ever single again, I’d rather close up shop and put an obit for my heart and vajeen in The New York Times (NYT is like, “Obits are for folks who made a contribution to society”) than get my National Treasure on and decipher vague text messages from a mediocre dude.

  * Look, I’m not entirely clear on what this “job” is, but it sounds a lot like my parents going, “Told you so,” anytime I screw up my life. They’ve been doing that for free for thirty-five years and counting. Dear reader, can y’all keep this white nonsense of an occupation between us? Otherwise, Phil and Octavia will be trying to garnish my wages for back pay for all their “intuitive consulting.”

  * In numerology rules, 2019 breaks down as the following: 2 + 0 + 1 + 9 = 12, which is further broken down as 1 + 2 = 3.

  * #WontHeDoIt

  * California’s Redwood National and State Parks is like, “Lol. Mofo, do not kill my fifth cousins twice removed aka the state of Indiana’s entire forestry to talk about hot peen and your artsy neuroses.” Point. Taken.

  * I’m #TeamAttractive because I’m not ignorant. Hair is hair, y’all, and some folks are talking about “it’s not manly for a guy to have long hair” or “long hair never adds to the attractiveness of a man, but it can subtract from it” or “men with short hair look good, but it’s really rare to find a hot guy with long hair.” News flash: SO MANY MEN WHO HAVE SHORT HAIR ARE BUSTED. IN SOME CASES, THEIR SHORT HAIR HAS CONTRIBUTED TO THEIR BUSTEDNESS. JUST BECAUSE A DUDE LOOKS LIKE A BASIC-ASS iMESSAGE AVATAR DOES NOT MEAN HE’S AUTOMATICALLY CUTE. Get a grip. Kiss a man with whom you can buy Goody elastic ponytail holders in bulk and stop this gendered nonsense. Live a little.

  * I’ve been alive thirty-six years and I’ve yet to meet one family where I’m like, “We need sequels.” Usually, I’m just like, “How about we call it? Time to wrap this up.”

  * Why do so many couples do this? When discussing whether to merge their two LLCs aka move in together, they’ll spend hours deciding between Verizon Fios or Spectrum as their future service provider and −28 minutes figuring out big-picture items such as if they want a family. Y’all, please have the hard talks before cohabitating; otherwise, you risk unnecessary heartbreak when you realize you two aren’t on the same page. And, by the way, you keep having those talks throughout your relationship. People change and so does what they want.

  * Okay. I Googled but could not find out what Soules’s middle name is, so I took a guess based on my opinion that so many white dudes’ middle names are often the first name of their great-grandpappy who built a house with his hands. That’s why it’s always some goofy shit that doesn’t quite flow perfectly like David Prescott Bartholomew Young, Eric Woodrow Baker, or Joe Aloysius Miller. So Eugene it is for White Nonsense Hall of Fame inductee Brandon Soules.

  * Basically, a pilot order means the network / streaming platform likes the script and the TV series idea, but they wanna shoot the pilot script first to see if they like it enough to order an entire season. It’s kinda like when you start dating someone and then introduce that person to your friends who, like you, also have boo-boo taste sometimes, before locking Bae down. None of y’all know what the hell you’re doing, but somehow it all works out. Frasier was on the air for thirteen years and everyone knows someone who has been married for thirty years.

  * Fun fact (for who, I don’t know): I am that person. And it’s even worse because I’m the boss, so my employees are forced to settle for mentally cussing me out over this ignorance, which is fair. Salmon and asparagus? That’s a fragrant as fuck combination. If the Diptyque candle company ever had a product with a scent that strong, they’d have been out of business two hours after their website went live.

  * This is why it’s imperative to have summer and winter foundations, because everyone’s skin lightens and darkens depending on the season. If you try to have one foundaysh that you use year-round, you’ll end up looking like Boo Boo the Fool. #HowManyWhitePeopleAreGoingToGoogleThatTerm #ALot

  * Who the hell made this rule?! Listen, I get that the longer we evolve as a society, the more hygienic we’re supposed to be, but I’m sanitary enough. Okay, fine, “I’m sanitary enough” sounds like something a trifling person would say, but I promise I’m clean! Like, I wash my hands, don’t believe in the five-second rule, and, duh, I don’t let bitches sit on my bed in their outside clothes. But buying a brand-new underwear collection EVERY SIX MONTHS?! Who’s got all these spare panty pesos? These full-cut brief francs? These thong Turkish liras? Yeah, that one was a mess, but you feel me. I thought the agreed-upon life cycle of underwear was as follows: new → then over time, natch discharge moves them to the period panties category → then they go back into everyday panty-wearing rotaysh because they’re cute AF on the outside → until wear and tear eventually makes them holey and causes the waistband to lose its elasticity → then your significant other comments on the Swiss cheesiness of your Underoos, so you playfully tell them to kiss your Black ass and continue to wear the underwear for another full year → until you see that Calvin Klein has a clearance sale, so you buy some new ones and hold a funeral for your raggedy drawers by going to the nearest lake, putting them on a barge, and shooting a flamed arrow at the barge like you’re the Blackfish sending off Lord Hoster Tully in Game of Thrones.

  * That . . . is a mouthful. Go ’head, Steve, keep giving the world that Game of Thrones “say my whole damn name and house” energy. We will bow down, boo.

  * Bitch, Champion where? Y’all, do a quick Googs of “Keds Champion leather sneaker,” look at that shoe, and tell me what championship that shoe represents? Keds is messy as hell to name this shoe that when it should be called “participation ribbon for doing the bare minimum of showing the fuck up.”

  * One time, I went to use a public restroom with this woman I knew somewhat well. I washed my hands; she did not and, instead, walked her trifling behind to the door and reached for the handle. I swallowed the small bit of vomit that materialized in my mouth at this unsanitary display and asked her if she forgot to wash her hands. Lol, I know that no one forgets to wash their hands but I was trying to give her an out that she clearly didn’t take because she hit me with this cavalier response: “Oh, I only peed, so no need. Now, if I went number two, then, of course, I’d wash
my hands.” She proceeded to walk out of the bathroom with the carefree vibes of women in emergency contraception commercials who can enjoy lemon poppy-seed muffins because they know they are childfree. Meanwhile, I stood frozen, replaying in my mind what she said “Only peed, so no need?!?!” Bitch, wut?! Don’t Dr. Seuss this! The average toilet paper has the thickness of a dissolvable Listerine Cool Mint breath strip, yet she’s acting like her pee-pee droplets would not penetrate the toilet paper and make contact with her fingertips as she wiped her vajeen? Jesus, take the wheel and my motherfuckin’ memory of all the times I touched something this heifer had. Point is, humans have been up to speed on how unhygienic it is to urinate and not wash their hands, yet they do it anyway, but I’m supposed to have faith that as soon as the Covid-19 threat was real, the world was gonna be nothing but a bunch of Howie Mandels, just sleeping in a vat of Purell hand sanitizer and washing their hands anytime they weren’t clean? Uh-huh . . . sure . . .