Dear Queen Latifa: My one and only fan letter. Ever.
The universe really does have a fun sense of humor sometimes.
Picture it: 1993-ish. I’m eleven years old, living in Maybee, Michigan, a village so small it didn’t even qualify as a town, which should tell you everything you need to know about the level of “options” available to me back then. There were two things that mattered in my life (okay, three if you count cats, which I always do): music and reading. I didn’t have refined taste in either, and if you ask my husband, I still don’t. I was just consuming whatever was within reach.
In 1993, my world was basically a mix of Lisa Frank folders, Goosebumps books, a walkman stuffed with mixtapes I’d recorded off the radio, complete with the DJ awkwardly talking over the first five seconds of every song, and MTV on the living room TV. Then one day, here comes Queen Latifah’s U.N.I.T.Y. on the screen, cutting through all the pop noise with this bold, no-nonsense anthem calling out harassment, disrespect, and demanding better.
It felt like I had just been handed the keys to an entirely different universe. Eleven-year-old me didn’t fully understand it, but I knew it mattered.
Now, when I like something, I don’t just like it, I fixate, I research, I obsess. So when I stumbled across a book about Queen Latifah, probably at a school book fair, or library, all I remember is the rush of “I need this in my life immediately.” I needed to know everything about the woman whose voice was living rent-free in my head.
The details of that book, and her life, are long gone from my memory, but here’s what I know for sure:
The book had an address in the back for fans to send Queen Latifah fan mail.
This must have sparked inspiration, because I actually wrote my first and only fan letter.
I didn’t have a stamp, and I was too embarrassed to explain what I was doing to ask anyone for a stamp, so I literally taped a quarter and a nickel to the envelope where the postage should go. I thought it was a brillant work-around. I’m sure my mailman did not. Spoiler: I’m positive the letter never made it out of Maybee.
Now, looking back as an adult, I would give anything to know what was in that letter. Did U.N.I.T.Y. spark my first wave of feminist rage? Did I also want to punch an annoying boy dead in his eye? (Almost certainly). What did an eleven-year-old white girl from rural Michigan find so inspiring, or so relatable, that I felt compelled to reach out to Queen Latifah of all people? And why her, of all celebrities, and not someone from 90210 or Kris Kross, like every other girl in my class?
I don’t remember, which means the mystery remains. Whatever the letter said, I’m positive it was a masterpiece of awkwardness that would make me want to disintegrate on the spot from secondhand embarrassment.
Flash forward three decades. I am now in my forties, working at a job that, lo and behold, just announced Queen Latifah as the spokesperson for a new program launch. Yes, that Queen Latifah. The same one I tried to reach out to in 1993.
My inner child is thrilled. Adult me is cringing at the memory every time her face pops up in our content. The universe really said: “Hey, remember that embarrassing childhood thing? Let’s circle back to that.”
That’s This Part of life that no one warns you about, the way your most ridiculous childhood embarrassments can boomerang back around as inside jokes from the universe, delivered decades later just to remind you not to take any of it too seriously.
So no, Queen Latifah never got my letter, but apparently she got the memo anyway, because here she is, showing up again in my story. That feels like the perfect kind of cosmic prank.
Now we want to hear from you: what’s your “mortified” moment? The thing your inner child still cringes about, but that adult-you can finally laugh at? Drop it in the comments like we’re passing notes in class, the more awkward, the better.
