I've Got This Round

by Mamrie Hart

  * Obviously, the Whitney version from the Bodyguard soundtrack. I love that whole album. I used to rock out hard to “Queen of the Night” as a nine-year-old, having no idea I was just scream-singing about being a prostitute.

  * One that I have recently been told has karaoke on Thursdays. That’s right. Karaoke at a BP gas station.

  * Pretty sure I called it the BARn, which is brilliant and a business I should probably open immediately.

  * My poor mom. While most kids made a list of toys, I was straight-up circling items in a Frederick’s of Hollywood mailer. Look, don’t call lingerie a “teddy” like the toy bear and adorn silky pastel outfits in rhinestones and feathers if you don’t want a weird eight-year-old pining after them like they are “adult costumes.”

  * A hyphenated town name? How progressive of you, PA!

  * I just want to give a special shout-out to the genius who realized they should start making boring old vitamins into gummies. I am still waiting for the day that they make gummy birth control. It may be the only way I’ll remember to take it regularly.

  * We were both bases in cheerleading back in our day, so never underestimate our brute strength.

  * Anyone with a rudimentary grasp on weather, probably.

  * Hayley is the one person besides my mom who calls me Mamie. I love it. It sounds like I’m from the 1800s, living on the prairie and hoping I get an orange and a penny for Christmas.

  * How is this not on a welcome billboard as soon as you enter my home county? I gotta run for office.

  * Don’t you dare try to act like you don’t like Train. You might think you don’t, but I guarantee if there was a GoPro in your car and “Hey, Soul Sister” came on, you would know all the words and you would have a delightful time singing them.

  * How the hell Funnymoon isn’t a 2003 movie starring Topher Grace and Drew Barrymore is beyond me.

  * For those of you who get uncomfortable when a building serves only three purposes, don’t worry. There was also mini golf, archery, and roller skating in the basement.

  * Oh my god, winter would’ve been a perfect time to throw those Home of the Whopper panties on that bad boy.

  * I’ve never understood how feeding someone is sexy. I am not a baby; I can hold the fork. Also, I don’t want you accidentally scraping your metal fork on my teeth. They are fucked up unique enough, thank you.

  * Cat Cora is an Iron Chef on the Food Network who is known for her Southern drawl and rampant drinking, aka me with knife skills.

  * Hey, I am the queen of sleeping in makeup. But not rolling to a flight the next morning, pretending like those aren’t your fake eyelashes from the night before. Like anyone glues tarantulas onto their eyes at six A.M.?

  * I’m sorry, I know the nail-art culture is a big deal these days, and I am all for getting in there with a magnifying glass and painting the cast of Game of Thrones on each digit to celebrate the season premiere, but I can’t handle the claw nails. Unless you are Lady Gaga and can pull off the look with an assistant doing your daily tasks, why have them? How. Do. You. Wipe?!

  * I also used this fake-out technique when I walked late at night in Brooklyn, as if some dudes plotting to rape/murder me were going to have a loud conversation about it first since they saw I had headphones in.

  * For those of you who don’t know what a LuMee case is because you actually use your phone for more important things than selfies, a LuMee case basically has a ring of light all around it. It gives you not only flattering and perfectly lit selfies but also extreme shame when someone catches you having a photo shoot in the produce section of Trader Joe’s with what is essentially a mini lighting kit.

  * Like he didn’t know. Pffffft. Yeah right, Bobby boy.

  * Besides my mother . . . I am legally bound to say that.

  * The only time I eat soup is because I crave pho and ramen when I’m hungover, and even then it’s usually accompanied with a Tsingtao.

  * Which is described in a riveting chapter in my first book called “Frame the Cookie,” in which I accidentally hired a sixty-five-year-old drug addict to teach us how to pole dance. Classic mistake!

  * What’s the deal with me gravitating toward people who vom out of cars? Should I talk to someone about this?

  * Side note: At this point, “turnt” was still very much an in and cool thing to say. Just throwing that out there in case you’re reading this and thinking to yourself that Ash sounds like a grandma trying to sound hip.

  * Living in LA, this happens more often than you’d think.

  * True story: every year my high school would have a prom fashion show thrown by a local bridal boutique. The best singers from show choir would sing as the jocks and preps modeled. Moments before my solo of “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic (hey, it was ’98), the bridal store owner ran up to me, clutching something massive. “You have to put on the Heart of the Ocean,” she said, lifting a giant replica of the necklace from the movie. I protested, but apparently she had it special ordered, so I was forced to wear it. My sister and her “bad kid” friends never let me live it down.

  * Myself excluded. The closest I’ve ever come to hunting is being rip-shit drunk and buying an animatronic mounted deer head off eBay.

  * Or should I say “pour guy”? Bahahaha— Oh, no? Just leave it as is? Got it.

  * Side note: I recently Googled the kid from Big. Turns out, he didn’t grow up to look like Tom Hanks, but he did grow up HOT. Hot enough that he used to be engaged to Kerry Washington! This is officially the most random celeb fact in this book. Feel free to drop it at dinner parties or anywhere else where people are hard up for facts.

  * I’m kidding, Heather et al! Y’all aren’t white trash. You aren’t even that redneck. Ashleigh and I went through a phase where we smoked Dorals. Now, that’s neck.

  * Totes kidding, Olive Garden exec who’s reading this. I love your establishment and would gladly take a lifetime supply of free breadsticks.

  * Shout-out to the alto section of the Boonville United Methodist Church.

  * I have zero shame in this being my favorite red-carpet beauty trick. Although it’s a double-edged sword because despite the fact that your cleavage will draw the attention from plenty o’ men, you are out of commission for the night because you can’t get naked. You’ll look like an old basement couch being held together with that tape.

  * Yep. I hate mayo, sour cream, cream cheese, yogurt, ranch . . . basically anything white and creamy. Go ahead. Cue the “There goes your dating life” joke from Clueless.

  * Maybe I didn’t pop up so much as awkwardly, slowly get to my feet like a sloth climbing out of quicksand.

  * Just said “dick” ’cause it sounded better. I wasn’t planning on fucking anyone. Or was I? Keep reading. You get no exclusives in this footnote.

  * This was also when I asked the DJ to play A Tribe Called Quest, and when he told me no, I flipped him off. Again, not sure why they let me come to this classy place.

  * Uber has changed the damn game when it comes to international travel. Now I don’t think I’m constantly being super ripped off when I’m super ripped. This is not a paid footnote.

  * One time our friend said that he came to one of our shows and found glitter in his asshole a week later. It was the nicest review of our band I’d ever heard.

  * Has anybody else been waiting for Air Bud: Now That’s Some Good Bud to come out now that weed is being legalized in so many states? A golden retriever weed dealer would be CINEMATIC GOLD.

  * For you younger readers, he made Tyler Oakley look like Brock Lesnar of the WWE.

  * To give you an idea of how Southern my family is, there is a rumor that Tammy Wynette and I are very loosely related because we share some ancestor who fought in the Civil War together. Like, what kind of backwoods rumor is that?

  * Even I am aware of how gross that sounds. Could you im
agine showing up to a sex show in a clear poncho like you were about to see Shamu jumping out of the water or Gallagher sledgehammering some watermelons? To be fair, there was a lot of breaching and seed spreading on that stage, so I guess it’s apropos. Hey-yo!

  * Or more specifically and niche, the singer of Rammstein’s “Du Hast.”

  * That adventure can be read all about in my first book. Available now wherever books are sold. ;)

  * We can go ahead and add that sentence to my “Things I Never Thought I’d Say” list.

  * No, no, I shouldn’t.

  * Come to find out, 4/20 is solely an American thing based on all the reserved, seated Dutch audience shooting us judgy looks.

  * Remember, I mean this as “strong, resilient woman”!

  * I didn’t put any Dixie Chicks in there because obviously you just need to download their whole catalog and memorize every word.

  * But, like, in a still-respectful way because it’s America’s sweetheart Faith Hill, and homegirl isn’t going to ruin her chance at a future Super Bowl halftime show by singing expletives.

  * Ideally with the silhouette of a leaping ballerina. Be sure not to use the iconic fire dancer from the Dave Matthews Band Stand Up album. You can find this by a simple Google search or tattooed on the body of anyone I avoided in college.

  * Dance is also why I have zero modesty and am fine dropping trou in front of any other female. Girls throw off their leotards quicker than a New Yorker tosses a mattress during a bedbug outbreak.

  * This is an actual quote that Abby has said on the show.

  * My apologies for those of you who don’t watch the show for all these niche references, and you’re welcome for those of you who do.

  * Which is not only my ultimate compliment but also my ultimate threesome.

  * Hell yeah, I did just drop a Mark Twain reference. I am smarter than I give myself credit for. . . . I can’t lie. I had to Google who wrote that. Thought it was Dickens, TBH.

  * True fact: I’m so blind that regular glasses are too thin for me. The one year I did wear glasses, I found out that one of my sketch teammates at Upright Citizen’s Brigade thought I’d been doing a bit all year. He thought they were PROP glasses.

  * One time in high school, I was the DD for friends who were on Ecstasy and we got pulled over. I literally had to make them stop raving in their seats to the cop lights before the officer came to our window.

  * Yeah, you’d like to impound this, I thought but, thank god, I didn’t say out loud.

  * Also because I coyly Snapchatted ten seconds of one of the dances, and as soon as it ended, a voice came on the PA system reminding everyone that no videotaping was permitted at this competition.

  * If you understood any of what that meant, congrats, we can be friends.

  * This is obviously hyperbole. Of course Alx James doesn’t have forehead wrinkles.

  * Seriously, that little smile he gives when he jumps off the ledge and lands on his feet like some sexy cat fully made sophomore me tingle in my boy-cut undies.

  * Obviously I had to Google the name of the stadium that the Steelers play in. Also, spoiler alert, it’s not shaped like a giant ketchup bottle.

  * Besides “Where is your bathroom?” asking for a Wi-Fi password is the only other phrase I can say in more than five languages.

  * Remember when white boys would twist their hair and throw some product in it for a one-night dreadlock look? The late nineties were truly the Depression era of hairdos.

  * Do you know what a pirate’s ideal body type on a wench is? S’curvy! Bye, guys, that’s my time on Earth! *straps on jet pack and jumps off planet*

  * Now, mind you, this was my second time going to Cannes that year. As someone whose previous beach experiences include almost being arrested at Myrtle Beach for flashing her tits out the back of a ’97 Wrangler, clearly I had arrived.

  * Fun fact! My first screen name, in sixth grade, was “Ballet007,” because I was obsessed with dance—as you know—but I also wanted an edge. Like, I was somehow going to do barre work and then go order a martini at a bar. What a weirdo.

  * Did they not even try to be creative when naming these classes? This was Littrell’y the worst name they could’ve chosen. Ba da ching!

  * Yes, more formal gowns. It was like one last-ditch effort to have their fave BSB look into the crowd and go, “You, yes, you in your blue tulle floor-length that was previously a bridesmaid dress and you want to get one more wear out of it. You. I love you.”

  * Isn’t it fun how back in the day when you blacked out you would get random flashes of memory throughout the day to jolt your regrets? With today’s technology, you no longer have to be hit in the face with these memories; just look at one of your social media timelines for immediate cringing!

  * Look at me, living in the future!

  * I swear to God, our go-to band was Guns N’ Roses, and I heard “Sweet Child o’ Mine” on the radio six times the next day. SIX.

  * One of the classic pics included in dudes’ profiles. They probably don’t even own a dog; they just know that a) women flock to that shit, and b) it is a visual confirmation that they are not a sociopath.

  * Ideally a fourteen-karat one, like in Cudzoo’s debut song. Did I mention the first time we performed it, we dropped teensie dolls that we had spray-painted gold out from our crotches via string and then swung them around like a flapper girl twirling a boa? So very PC.

  * Ideally, he is also, like Westley, doing so while saying “as you wish.”

  * Don’t for one second sit there holding this book and not admit that the animated Robin Hood from the Disney classic cartoon wasn’t hot. He was a literal fox, and Kevin Costner and Russell Crowe didn’t capture that same magnetism in the role. . . . Oh! And Cary Elwes in Men in Tights. Damn, two Elwes refs in one chapter?

  * Special shout-out to my number one homie . . . an online anagram generator.

  * Nowadays, it would be a lot more “Would I ever have sex with him?” or “Does she look like that barista from the Coffee Bean who has Resting Judgey Face?”

  * To this day I still compare people to Guess Who? characters. Just last week I went on a blind date with a guy who looked like a Frans in his profile pic but a Bill IRL.

  * I barely learn my lines when I go to an audition, but I am straight-up Daniel Day-Lewis when it comes to a costume party.

  * Titty Titty Bang Bang? . . . I’m sorry.

  * Lifeless except for scratching the mosquito bite on her ankle. Wasn’t surprised she wasn’t committed to this role considering she didn’t even get a line.

  * Except for Maegan going so HARD on a bag of Kettle chips that it sounded like a gravel truck was parked in our room. Also, remember when Ke$ha said she had sex with a ghost? Ahhh, simpler times.

  * We’ve used this phrase since college. It basically means that she’s my girl for life. My wifey. Although it doesn’t mean we can’t be with dudes. Just means we date guys who are older than us so when their shorter life span makes them kick the can, we have a solid fifteen years of living that Golden Girls life together.

  * I know I’m eliciting some eye rolls even suggesting that WWE is like Shakespearean theater. However, I did see Kevin Owens give a very Hamlet-esque twenty-minute monologue to open Monday Night Raw once. He wasn’t holding a skull, but he did get hit in the skull by a metal chair, so there’s that.