You Can't Touch My Hair: And Other Things I Still Have to Explain

by Phoebe Robinson

But the ’90s were full of bad choices, OK? Like guys in boy bands wearing golf visors when they weren’t golfing, the movie Battlefield Earth, Lou Bega and his “Mambo No. 5” bullshit, pizza bagels, the Gulf War, Utah Jazz point guard John Stockton wearing short shorts on the basketball court, and me spending three weeks trying to memorize the lyrics to Barenaked Ladies’ “One Week”—after those twenty-one days, all I got down was: “Chickity China, the Chinese chicken.” Three weeks, guys! That’s all I got! The point is, in the ’90s, mistakes were made. Lessons were learned. And thanks to Ricky Martin’s “The Cup of Life” performance at the 1999 GRAMMYs, I learned that my vajeen is capable of quaking over nonblack dudes the way the glass of water did in Jurassic Park when dinosaurs were nearby.