by Mamrie Hart
Going to the first rehearsal, I was super nervous. Everyone else who was on the team had been in the theater awhile. They knew each other. They had been drunk together. I knew one person, my friend Steve, whom I’d met in my class. Fun fact! That first rehearsal, we read a sketch called “Everyone Loves Grace,” in which we played ourselves pitching sketches, the whole premise being that every sketch Grace pitched, no matter how terrible, everyone loved. Every guy’s pitch ended with Grace kissing him. Meanwhile, everything I said would be quickly shut down and ignored. This sounds a lot more mysogynistic than it was, trust me. Our sketch group was called Finger, and that is where the friendship deal was sealed.
Long story short, Grace and I remained friends after the group split up. We also became each other’s daytime drinking buddy. She was making “Daily Grace” videos and I was bartending. Neither of us had a normal nine-to-five job, and we lived four blocks away from each other. This meant we would get Bloody Marys at one p.m. on a Tuesday and not pass any judgment!
One day over drinks, I told Grace that I had a really dumb idea that would combine my bartending and bad puns. This was right when Charlie Sheen was going batshit fucking “winning” crazy. I thought it would be fun to create a cocktail based on his breakdown and make a tutorial comedy video about it. And thus my first episode, “Charlie Sheen’s Tiger Blood Gimlet,” was filmed and my show You Deserve a Drink was born.
The reason why I give you this backstory is because when this comment was made, Grace actually edited my videos. That’s like saying Chris Gaines copied Garth Brooks. It’s the same damn person! And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, do yourself a favor and google that shit. I took over editing shortly thereafter, but the first two years of YDAD, Grace was kind enough to edit for me. The only person copying Grace’s editing style was . . . Grace. Actually, this is less of an insult to me and a compliment to Grace for having such consistent editing skills!
Now! Here is where I tell you my dirty little secret. Sometimes, and I do mean very rarely, I will have a few too many gin gimlets at home and end up looking at my comments. Of course, I check them the first hour I put a video up to make sure that I don’t have two minutes of black screen at the end, or didn’t realize my boob randomly pops out for a few frames. But once in a blue moon (or after too many Blue Moons) I get deep in them comments. Even less often, I actually respond to a comment. Most of these I type out, take another sip of martini, and delete. Type, delete, repeat. But there is the occasional sip slip of judgment. This was one of them:
thanks darlin. Grace actually edits them, so good eye
Notice the pet name, the impeccable level of passive-aggression with putting him in his place and then complimenting him. There’s a saying in the South that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. I wasn’t going to be mean about it. I wanted to make him feel bad! I wanted to slather him in honey. After all, there was already enough vinegar with that douche hanging out. Hey-yo.*
Ladies and gentleman, this is the response I got back:
ohmygod no no no no no that was one of my ‘friends’ who shares my account, I LOVE THESE VIDEOS!!!!! trust me!!!!! i know grace edits them, it says at the end:/ I LOVE YOU MAMRIE!!!!! THAT WASN’T ME I SWEAR!!!!
Here’s what I’ve noticed from these little responses of mine. Whenever I call someone out on crossing the line or just a sheer correction, nine out of ten times they have an excuse. It’s never, “Sorry if that hurt your feelings, that’s just my truth”; it’s always . . .
You totally read that the wrong way!!! I looooove you!
My brother signed into my account and typed that!!
I meant to type that on a different video!!!!!
A SUPER bitchy ghost just possessed my body & typed that!!
You misunderstood!! That wasn’t English!! When translated into Klingdingdong it means “I’m OBSESSED WIT U!!!!”
It’s always some lame excuse. Their thighs gotta hurt from all that backpedaling. But you have to remember (you being myself on YouTube, or if you are getting hate in e-mail, or anonymous messages in any form), these people would never say this stuff to your face. It’s like when your friend drinks way too many margaritas and calls you an asshole. You take it with a grain of salt (or lots of grains of salt, when you promptly pound enough tequila shots to get on their level), because you know it’s the booze talking. People who are constantly mean on the Internet are basically drunk assholes, word-vomiting out rude comments. You can’t take them seriously.
The Genius
Your an asshole
YOU’RE a genius.
Leaves of Three Martini
3 oz cucumber juice
6 basil leaves
2 oz gin
½ oz simple syrup
Celery bitters
Time to break out that juicer you bought two years ago that’s been collecting dust on your shelf ever since! Bust out that bad boy to make the cuke juice. And if you don’t have a juicer (or a friend with lofty health goals), just sub lime juice.
Throw 3 basil leaves into a shaker with the cucumber juice. Muddle it together. If you don’t have a muddler, you can always use a wooden spoon or a novelty-size baseball bat. Add the gin and simple syrup. Then swirl it all around—don’t shake! Shaking the gin will make it bruise quicker than the knees of a hemophiliac after a blow job. Strain into a pretty glass, garnish with the remaining 3 basil leaves, and use an atomizer to spray 3 big mists of celery bitters over the top. If you don’t have an atomizer or are allergic to class, add 1 or 2 drops of bitters.
In the film masterpiece She’s All That, Freddie Prinze Jr.’s character is under a lot of pressure from his dad to go to Dartmouth. I think it’s safe to say we’ve all felt that FPJ parental pressure when it comes to picking colleges, right? Umm . . . wrong! Where I’m from, the fact that I was graduating high school was already way impressive, so college was just icing on the Bo-Berry Biscuit.*
When it came time to apply to colleges, I really had no idea where to go. My initial plan was to get as far away from North Carolina as possible. True story—I had the option to have my pre-SAT scores automatically sent to a college of my choice, and I chose Brigham Young University–Hawaii. Yes, Brigham Young as in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I had no idea it was a Mormon school; I just saw the word Hawaii on the form and went for it.
My dreams of wearing a grass skirt and sipping mai tais during calculus went out the window when I got my scores back. There was no way I was getting a full ride on that number, never mind the fact that I’m not a Mormon. I was bummed. My GPA was higher than 4.0, but I guess SATs weren’t my thing. It didn’t help that they scheduled the SATs for the same day as prom. How was I supposed to be working out complicated analogies while I was daydreaming about my cornrows/French twist updo combo?
I turned my focus to schools that were in state. I refused to go to community college. Listen, there is nothing wrong at all with a good ol’ CC. But I just couldn’t stay in my county anymore. I come from a town with one stoplight, where guys attach metal nut sacks to the back of their trucks as a sign of manliness. Add to that the fact that I had dated most of those nut-sack sporters, and it was game over.
What about the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill? I thought. After all, I look super fuckin’ good in light blue.
In classic, responsible Mamrie fashion, it was the only school I applied to, and I put my application in the mail literally seconds before the post office closed, on the last day it could be postmarked. Part of this was laziness; the other part was that it was a forty-dollar application fee at the time. These days, I will spend that much on a bottle of blueberry vodka or a novelty pair of jumbo granny panties, but those days? Forget it. That was a double shift at the movie theater.
But the college gods smiled upon me.
&nb
sp; Chapel Hill is a Norman Rockwell painting of a four-year university. Lounging under hundred-year-old trees in the quad between classes, throwing keggers in our yard, winning the NCAA championship my senior year. Everything about UNC was perfect, including the girls. Therein lay the problem—the problem of not getting laid. These weren’t just ordinary girls. These girls looked like they had all just walked out of a J.Crew catalog. They were all in sororities, lived in Lilly Pulitzer dresses, and had names like Catherine Louise Vanderbilt Montgomery XI. Meanwhile, I was co-president of Topless Tuesday, wore Poison concert tees, and openly burped in public like I was being possessed by the ghost of a velociraptor.
Luckily for me, my roommates were all normal and not the priss-pots in floral cardigans we’d see on campus. But being normal had its drawbacks. Let’s just say guys weren’t exactly forming lines to date us. Being asked out was borderline impossible for a “normal” girl like me.
While we spent the fall getting dolled up and squeezing into our best velvet pants (it was 2001), by the time Thanksgiving rolled around we all said fuck it. Winter of our freshman year was spent in pajamas in my dorm, mixing up frozen margs and singing the Dixie Chicks into hairbrushes.
We became such hermits that the only time we saw guys was in class or the dining halls. We would have crushes on guys from afar but never actually talk to them.
Did you see Green Hat in the dining hall today? He asked me to quit hogging the ranch dressing. I think we had a moment.
Sadly, I think the picture of Erika and me singing into hairbrushes is actually from Valentine’s Day.
You guys. White Shirt is totally in my philosophy lecture. He sneezed last week, and I was this close to saying, “God bless you.” Dammit, Mamrie! We could be engaged by now.
In our defense, we were screwed from the get-go. Unfortunately, not literally. While other college freshmen were basking in the scandal of living mere feet from the opposite sex, we were left out in the cold. The four of us had all requested a coed hall but were put together in an all-girls academic hall, or the “Virgin Vault,” as it was so aptly called by the rest of the tower. I get that there wasn’t enough coed housing, but putting us all in the same suite didn’t make sense. They put the troublemakers in one place, like when Australia was a penal colony. Why stick us on the same floor as a seventeen-year-old getting her doctorate? Big mistake. We would be taking shots of room-temp raspberry vodka and making up a choreographed dance to Outkast, only to be yelled at by our hallmates:
Girls, seriously. I have heard “Ms. Jackson” on repeat for the last three hours. Can you please quiet down?
Aarushi, it’s four p.m.! Get off our back. Here, take this. I handed her a shot. It’ll make you calm the fuck down.
Later that semester, Aarushi would make her first B due to partying so much. I refused to take the blame. But I will take the credit for her record-breaking twenty-seven-second keg stand. When that girl put her mind to something, she’d do it really well.
Since meeting a guy on our floor was out of the question and putting on pants was required to leave the floor, dating was nonexistent. But in all truth I didn’t want to go out with those frat chumps anyway. They wore pink polo shirts. Pink polo shirts tucked into pleated khakis. I am not hating on the Greek system in general. I spent many a wonderful night taking advantage of their parties with live bands and free beer. Hell, I even went with a friend to his frat formal in Charleston . . . dressed in full 1800s Southern regalia.* But frat dudes were mostly my friends, and not people I was interested in.
The only time I’d ever have luck meeting guys would be grad students or older guys. Lucky for me, I had the greatest wingman for all four years of college: a fake ID. That baby was my BFF. It wasn’t fake so much as it was someone else’s real ID, and I had to scrunch my face up and bug my eyes out every time a bouncer looked at me. But it always worked like a charm.
One night, my girls and I decided to peel the pajama pants off and go out. We got to the bar and right out of the gate I started having a super flirt session with a very attractive Italian guy. I’m not talking Italian like lives at home and lets his mom iron his underwear and cook him chicken parm every night. I’m talking the straight-up, plays fútbol, is named Piero, and barely understands what I’m saying kind of Italian. At this time, I was super into the show Friends (my roommates and I would make sure we were home at eight p.m. on Thursday, and if we weren’t we would tape it on a VCR—yep, I’m that old, folks), so I often gleaned my life lessons from the wisdom of that Greenwich Village gang. I knew for a fact that Rachel didn’t need to speak Italian to be able to date Paolo for almost an entire season. If she could do it, I could do it. After all, I did look like Jennifer Aniston . . .’s overweight cousin, Tonya. I imagined going home with him to Sicily and his mother having me try the marinara from a wooden spoon, making sure the seasoning was right. I’d sip red wine as I helped sprinkle the basil chiffonade on the caprese salad, looking out the window at my new Italian boyfriend as he played checkers with a table of old men from the village. (Like I said, it had been a while since I’d gotten any male attention.) Naturally, I went home with him.
Everyone relax! There was no stranger danger. I was going back to a house with a group of people, including a girl from my sociology class whom the Italians were visiting. I knew her. I knew her name and that she also needed sociology as a requirement. So, we squeezed into their rented convertible, put the top down, and cruised back to her house. About a half mile away, blue lights appeared in the rearview. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Our driver was sober, but Little Miss Idiot in the backseat was eighteen and drunk as a skunk. To be more specific, a skunk who’d just done five Jäger bombs.
The cop was actually cool (a sentence I never thought I’d say) and told us if we left the car there and walked the rest of the way, he wouldn’t Breathalyze anyone. Deal! After all, we had a designated driver (the Italian Screech of the crew), but we’d been dumb-asses to try and fit four people in the backseat. We all piled out and started walking toward what’s-her-face’s my dear friend’s house. About halfway there, I had to take a major whiz. Being the classy thing that I am, I politely excused myself and popped a squat in the woods. Squatting down, listening to the breeze through the trees and the pee hitting the ground beneath my feet, the night felt magical. I was finally gonna get some sweet, sweet ass. I couldn’t risk hooking up after a drip-dry!
I reached around me and grabbed a few leaves. Toilet paper is technically made out of trees, I reasoned, so the leaves were like the freshest one-ply TP available. #organic
RUTABAGA!
Once back at the house, the Italian and I had fun. I beat him at Ping-Pong, and then I beat on his ding-dong. I kid! That rhyme was too great not to go for. It takes a little more than that to put a notch on my lipstick case, but I was happy to “brush” up on him (makeup innuendo FTW).
The next day, the hangover was painful. But it wasn’t as painful as being dropped off in front of your dorm by a convertible full of Italian men. Let me add that this was around nine fifteen a.m., right when everyone is headed to their nine-thirty class. Oh great, there’s Green Hat watching me crawl out of this Miata full of dudes. Fantastic! There’s White Shirt thinking I just played “Put Your Weenie in My Arancini” with five Italian dudes. But I played it cool (pretended to get a dramatic call on my flip phone) and hurried into the dorm. Once the elevator doors closed and I could finally relax, I noticed it. Something felt off in my pants. I fought the urge to panic and immediately drop my pants in the elevator, waiting until I got to my room.
There, on the toilet, is when I realized that nothing would ever be the same. Peering downtown, I saw that my hoo-ha was red and itchy and—holy fuck, I had Italian herpes! That was the only explanation. I straight-up had Italian herpes. Granted, it was probably much classier than normal herpes, with its affinity for high fashion and late-night dinners, but it was still herpes. And herpes is the one
thing that lasts forever. Not true love, not diamonds—herpes. When the apocalypse comes, it won’t just be cockroaches that survive. It will also be herpes and that random bottle of crème de menthe you bought years ago.
Upon learning about my new “forever friend,” I took a shower hot enough to take off the top two layers of epidermis. I awkwardly crawled into bed. Just as I was about to finish filling out my online application to the nunnery, it hit me. That wasn’t the herp; that was poison ivy! I must’ve, like an idiot, wiped with poison ivy leaves in the dark when I pissed in the woods!
I was so overcome with a sense of relief until I realized, Hold up. I have poison ivy all over my vagina and butt crack. It was like, Phew, I thought I was eating poison but turns out it’s only dog shit. You still aren’t exactly coming out on top.
And when I get poison ivy, I get poison ivy. When I was a little girl, I would spend a lot of time in the woods, and at least once a year my sister and I would come home covered in poison ivy. It would get so bad on our hands that my mom would have to feed us ’cause we couldn’t pick up our forks. We looked like straight-up Garbage Pail Kids. We just never learned the adage “Leaves of three, let it be.”*
Now, here’s the superfun thing about having poison ivy all up in your butt crack. When you walk, the friction between your cheeks will cause it to spread. So I was pretty much detained from walking. And if I did, I was walking in a ballet second position with toilet paper separating my butt cheeks.
I missed a lot of class in those few weeks, and when my suitemates were questioned about where I was, they quickly made up excuses for me.
