Angela Means is crying. Not bawling—but just enough to suggest she’s brushing away something wet. It’s not grief exactly, and it’s not weakness. On the phone from Tahoka, Texas, she’s carrying something—thirty years of an untold story—and letting just a little of it out as she recounts a scene. Not that one. Not the one you think.
That scene: Felisha, in Friday, knocking on Smokey’s door to borrow a VCR, as if it isn’t just past nine in the morning. The braids. The sunken cheeks. The half-smile, cracked like a window that won’t close all the way. She’s the cousin, the neighbor. Or that stranger with the nerve to ask. And then comes the line—sharp enough to end a bloodline: “Bye, Felisha.” Two words, tossed like lint, still hanging in the air thirty years later—flattening a woman, erasing her intent, and echoing a feeling Black women know too well.
But that’s not the tale the actor behind the character is telling. Not today. There’s another Felisha. The one who stayed with Debo. Ten years with eight boys. Her body breaking, quietly—teeth loosening, bones turning soft. And still, she stays. Makes it work and holds them up. She finds a way to hold herself up and keep them fed, clothed and seen. Even got them through high school, before college scouts began waiting at the other end like salvation.
“I’m so sorry that I’m crying,” Means says, her voice breaking a bit.
She’s cried on camera before—most memorably during a Hype+ interview in 2022—but the tears weren’t just for Felisha. She was running her vegan restaurant then, deep in 15-hour shifts, when someone dropped a slur under a Felisha meme. “I wasn’t media ready,” she says. “I cracked in the interview.” The clip went viral.
“They dragged me from one end of Twitter to the other of TikTok,” says Means; a woman grieving a character no one else had ever tried to see.
She exhales. “For once, she’s revered in my extended story. She didn’t stop. She gave everything—her mind, body and soul—to those boys. They were so good to her. She can finally exhale, and finally, someone knew who she was.”
No one expected ‘Bye, Felisha’ to last forever. Friday was a comedy, sure, but also a time capsule: South Central in the ’90s, on a porch, in the sun, before the day gets away from you. Directed by F. Gary Gray and written by Ice Cube and DJ Pooh (Red), it stood in the long shadow of the crack epidemic and within the embers of the 1992 uprisings, yet it centered everything on a single day and on a single block in Los Angeles.
But as many know, something happened in the margins. One line—those two words—broke free from the movie and started orbiting.
None of the male characters—Smokey, Craig, even Debbie—ever paused to consider Felisha’s deeper struggle. Her pain was easy to ignore, turning her into a meme that got more play than any real acknowledgment. The neighbors’ disregard was obvious, until the violence crossed a line—Deebo hit a young Nia Long, Craig’s love interest. Only then did it become something they couldn’t ignore, exposing a certain callousness beneath the surface. Felisha was a worthy punchline, no doubt, but it was this very neglect that would decades later, fuel Means’ reclamation of the character.
In the years after Friday, Hollywood—the same industry with a knack for turning side characters into icons—could never take credit for how the phrase ‘Hi, Felisha’ would sour, its meaning forever linked to Means. She showed up in Los Angeles in the early ’90s, already with runway creds from Bill Blass and Bob Mackie, plus a comedic edge sharpened on Def Comedy Jam tours. But it was another kind of fame she’d find—one born not from the limelight, but from that throwaway moment everyone loved to laugh at. Friday was a different temperature. The kind of fame it provided was unique—no velvet ropes, tour managers, or limos to keep it all at bay.
“People were just all over me,” Means remembers of a trip to the grocery store in a mostly white neighborhood through laughter. “I’d never felt anything like that before. I had my newborn with me, and suddenly, people were leaning over his cradle, touching him, talking to him. It was overwhelming.”
And yet, even in that moment, she hadn’t reached meme-able levels. “She wasn’t where she is now. She was just a character out of Friday, who I also love. They didn’t even remember the name of the character. They just remembered, ‘Oh, you’re that girl from the hood in Friday.’”
Means recalls, “Those early days in the industry were filled with wonder, self-doubt, and a quiet resistance to becoming someone I wasn’t. I didn’t know who I was. I was a country girl raised among farmers, where thinking outside the box got you ridiculed. But I was wide-eyed, eager to learn, and goofy—I just wanted to tell jokes. I didn’t go to college; I went straight into modeling, then comedy.”
Such was the peak of Black comedy in the ’90s. Films like Friday, House Party, and Booty Call were cultural landmarks. And whether bootlegged, rerun, or rewound to death, they were homes for stand-up comics and one-liners that could last longer than the box office. One scene could launch a career. One face could follow you for life. And in today’s meme economy, those moments are immortal—cropped, clipped, and ready for a quote tweet.
“There are kids who have never seen Friday quoting this around Felisha,” says writer, activist, and author of So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo. “There are kids out here who’ve never seen the movie quoting this—using it as a blanket dismissal for anyone annoying or out of pocket.”
A good meme, after all, needs a perfect storm: timing, emotion, and someone you almost recognize. Felisha was that—Dictionary.com certified. Brushed off as a crackhead who mostly housed the joke, though the film never showed her using. What people saw—what they felt, maybe without knowing—was something truer.
Oluo says, “We still haven’t reckoned with how addiction was framed in the ’90s. Black women weren’t shown as people battling a crisis—they were used to represent it. Thin, desperate, tragic. They became the face of the epidemic, not its victims.”
“And it was specific to Black women to portray issues of all kinds…What that means—to just divorce that from what is really a violence done to our community—and have Black women portray that through their body… it was a really specific thing.”
Means wouldn’t disagree, even if she’s declaring this from a different place, wholly separate from the movie Friday. She runs Jackfruit Café, a vegan restaurant where food becomes a vehicle for healing—both physical and emotional. The space mirrors her journey, transforming from surviving to thriving. It’s about nourishment, and reclaiming her story.
Means hopes we can see Felisha as being able to be two things at once: a funny punchline and a symbol of resilience. Much in the same way, she says, she’s used the cultural currency of the character to guide her son Bradley Kaaya through the NFL and into a life of purpose.
Means still looks back on the decision to step away from her career after Kaaya was born, pouring herself into her role as a football mom. She wore every hat—Snack Shack coordinator, team manager, the whole nine—while trusting the process, even as her aspirations took a backseat. The resurgence of ‘Bye, Felisha’ became a quiet marker of her growth.
“She’s never, ever been a burden,” says Means, who applies the same sentiment to the film and everyone involved. “She’s only been a blessing. And I can only hope that she one day becomes a blessing to others.”