That one is me. I used to be so good at faces, until suddenly I met so many faces, they all started to just blur together.
Did I see Erika Alexander of Living Single in a Walmart parking lot in Los Angeles last week, or was it just some other stylish black lady driving through? I dunno. It looked like her.
I imagine I’ll be doing this a lot come Sunday in Los Angeles when I—your friendly neighborhood managing editor, Danielle Belton—along with Senior Editor Yesha Callahan, go to the 2017 BET Awards.
While I know and enjoy the rap, as Yesha would say, do I know and like it enough to memorize faces beyond Drake? After all, as a nonmillennial, you can enjoy “Bad and Boujee” without ever watching the (iconic) video or consuming any Migos-related media beyond the occasional post on The Root (shameless plug).
Or, at least that’s what I did as someone who’s seen the ramen-noodle-infested video and not much else.
Still, I should probably brush up on a few things ahead of going to the blackest award show on television (no offense, NAACP Image Awards or Soul Train Awards). BET’s is an award show that delivers thrilling highs — from your Beyoncé-Kendrick collabos and various Prince tributes (my fave being the one Prince actually got to enjoy while he was still alive) to Ace Hood’s broken bezel and that time Ving Rhames ruined everything.
Anything could happen, so we’re going to live-blog it! And tweet it! And all the “its”—we’re doing them! And this should be an exciting awards show with the likes of both a reunited Xscape and my favorite “boy band-turned-man group,” New Edition, performing.
Because of this, I don’t want to be that person—you know that person—who hastily hands someone a cellphone saying, “Hey, dude, can you take this picture of me, Cardi B. and El DeBarge real quick?” and have that person I’m shoving a camera phone onto be a Migos. There are three of them, right? So that’s three faces I need to learn.
Other things I should probably do before going to the BET Awards:
- Get my nails done.
- Listen to something the kids are into these days. Do the kids like Lil Yachty?
- Memorize all these faces that aren’t Xscape, A$AP Rocky, Maxwell, New Edition, Mary J. Blige and El DeBarge.
Wish me luck! Pretty positive I’m going to screw up somehow with my face blindness by confusing Trey Songz with some dude I went to high school with, but that’ll just be a fun life lesson for us all.