The year was 1987 and Brenda Dickson had just been fired from her long-running role on The Young and the Restless. The writing was likely on the wall given months earlier Brenda proclaimed she’d never leave the show unless she was fired, but, regardless of the circumstances,1 Brenda now had a grudge and a plethora of free time to fritter away, so she did what so many others would later do under similar conditions: she turned to #selfpromo.
This was before YouTube and podcasting, so Brenda had to get creative. Rather than buy a ring light and a mini microphone she blew $5K on a cameraman to come film a day of her life as she fumbled through what would ultimately become the Fashion Haul and Get Ready With Me (or #GWRM). She also gave diet and exercise advice just as proudly dubious as any modern lifestyle influencer. To get the resulting video seen she had to sell VHS tapes through an ad in Soap Opera Digest, because back then going viral required different tactics.
The video didn’t really take off. Brenda remained (allegedly) blacklisted from Hollywood and life was gearing up to deal her several more nasty blows in the years that followed, but a couple of decades later the benevolent space grizzly who controls our feverish destiny granted us the Lament Configuration we call YouTube and this time the world was ready for Brenda’s vision. At this point, Welcome to My Home (or Welcome to my Home depending on which title card you consider canon) has been an internet curio longer for longer than Brenda’s stint on The Young and the Restless.
Brenda Dickson wasn’t wrong. She was early.2
#FashionHaul
“Whew, that was exhausting. So I thought I would slip into something a little more comfortable,” Brenda smiles confidently at us after “teleporting” into her closet from her living room. She’s now in her second gold lamé gown of the day and sandwiched between racks of garments, some of which are in dry cleaning bags or on wire hangers3. If you’re wondering about the pink feather thing protruding to the left, your curiosity is about to be sated. “Fashion is something that is acquired by looking at a lot of different fashions,” is Brenda’s Criswellian assertion and it’s hard to argue otherwise, just as you can’t deny that “in shopping you’ll find that your eye will be drawn to the things that you like” or that those are, indeed, bugle beads.
We’re treated to a “fashion show” of glossies of Brenda in outfits curated from her own closet. While the end credits do list some stores and brands as if they’re aware they’re involved in this production, it’s a little surprising Brenda herself doesn’t namedrop anyone. Instead she provides vague observations, like that oversized sweaters are cozy and sometimes you can wear a hat, both of which are objective truths.
While the pretext is that Brenda, our guiding light, is “teaching” us something, the true intent is to show off what Brenda has that we peasants can only aspire to, if golden shoulder pads, bugle beads, and a pink slip from CBS Daytime are our high watermark of wealth. Today, however, we’re met with a fascinating paradox: Brenda’s fashion show is less wasteful than the average haul video. Brenda hasn’t ordered a sack of (allegedly) lead-infused fast fashion off Shein to try on for views which she’ll then throw away or “donate” to someone else who will then throw it away. She’s showing off things she already has on hand and intends to keep. Per a 2018 Vanity Fair article she still had that flamboyant orange gown thirty years later. Perhaps that would have changed had Welcome to My Home been a long-term project requiring constant uploads, but 1987 was before the iron grip of CONTENT so somehow Brenda manages to skirt conspicuous overconsumption even as she dresses up in diamonds and pink ostrich feathers.
#GRWM
Our next lesson on how to become the bold and the beautiful opens with Brenda seated at a vanity in a vivid red silk robe that’s giving Dracula (1992). Adding to the vibe are at least three fresh flower arrangements. She leans with calculatedly casual poise, one elbow resting on the back of her Lucite chair. There’s a persistent echo that suggests Brenda and the cameraman are in a bathroom.
“Alright, when I start my makeup, I start with a clean face,” she tells us. The video immediately cuts to a closeup of Brenda in full makeup but with a towel on her head. We’ve been welcomed into her home, yes, but this is still a highly curated glimpse of her life, and, as sure as the world turns, it’ll be a cold day in Hell before we see Brenda without a full face of glam, which utterly kneecaps the makeup tutorial concept from the get-go.
Brenda reveals that rouge comes in an array of colors, ranging from pink to orange to a real, real dark kind of orange. She does this while touching one of the products laid out on the vanity. Brenda assures us this is everything we’ll need to do our makeup, though the actual products themselves remain a mystery.
Brenda’s unwilling to give up her secrets and unable to come up with the banter required to fill the airspace while blending either way. She establishes a rudimentary framework for the #GRWM, but it takes someone with the skill of Bailey Sarian or Trixie Mattel to really run with the concept, and watching Brenda kind of crash out on this segment might give you a new appreciation for the charisma required to excel at YouTube makeup artistry. Brenda’s end result is sort of an anti-makeup tutorial that’s performance art in its own right.
#LegDay
“So let’s go into my bedroom where I keep my exercise equipment and talk about exercise,” Brenda purrs into the microphone over a glamour shot of herself in a bikini. Before we can wonder if that’s a euphemism, Brenda’s in a shiny purple leotard holding a Pekinese we’ll soon learn is named Charles. Multiple pieces of full-size exercise equipment have been crammed next to her bed.
Pause. Rewind.
Five years before Brenda welled her first hello, Jane Fonda released Workout (or “Jane’s Fonda” if you’re from Rhode Island), an aggressively upbeat aerobics video that was such a hit it helped launch an empire and even increased sales of the VCR. It remains popular on YouTube to this day. There were concerns that some of Fonda’s original exercises and spoken encouragements pushed participants beyond what they could handle and reportedly landed a few people in the general hospital. Fonda responded by changing things up to be safer and more inclusive on the next go-around.
Fast forward back to 1987.
“This will be the answer to all of your problems,” Brenda, smiling like the Cheshire Cat, says in a tut-tut tone as she languidly pedals on the bike to synthesized drumbeats. By now the camera has zoomed in, granting Charles the Pekinese a temporary reprieve. A distractingly phallic pot is prominent over Brenda’s shoulder. “You will stop gaining weight if you do your cardiovascular.”
The concept of coming across an ad for a video in the back of Soap Opera Digest, sending in payment, receiving the VHS in the mail, and popping it on only to have Brenda Dickson look you in the eye and body-shame you is pretty wild when put into words, but coming up with an innocuous trait for people to be ashamed of then peddling the “cure” is the driver of entire industries. Brenda wasn’t the first and she won’t be the last, but there’s also a self-defeating hand-tip here where Brenda keeps admitting she has a high-end gym she visits at least three times a week while pretending zoning out on a bike for a few minutes in front of the television is the key to Hollywood abs.
Brenda already got your dollar when you bought the video, so she hasn’t devised any sort of new product or cure to peddle. The only routine she demonstrates is coasting on the exercise bike, lifting a dumbbell above her head, and taking Charles for a walk. A few years later a different contentiously fired TV star would strike it rich after becoming the face of the ThighMaster, but we can’t all be that #blessed. Brenda sure wasn’t.
#EatClean
“Alright, here it comes. The part you’ve all been dreading,” Brenda sighs, and given the content of the exercise segment, this is a credible threat. “One of the most important parts of being beautiful and being fashionable is being in shape.”
As she says this we’re shown yet another glamour shot of Brenda, this time in a fringe bikini that looks like it was assembled using a glue gun.
“And the way you achieve that is eating right. Sure, you can have that occasional pizza or fast food, but I’m going to show you the way you should eat maybe three days a week, or as much as you can.”
Perhaps in Brenda’s mind the Hobby Lobby bikini is a motivator, but if the choice is between enjoying pizza or the punishment of wearing that thing, I’m going with the pizza every single time. If we have one life to live we should damn well enjoy it.
“So let’s go into my kitchen where we’ll do my kind of cooking,” Brenda says, and it’s immediately obvious this woman hasn’t cooked in years, if ever. Our suspicions are confirmed as soon as we see Brenda in a tropical onesie and matching headscarf holding a white cat who is massive, magnificent, and decidedly not having it. There’s not a single cooked item on the table.
“Good morning. Meet my cat Snow. I’m starving,” Brenda announces. Having successfully introduced us to all her children, she sets Snow down on the nearest chair. Snow makes direct eye contact with the camera and simply walks the fuck out.
“Did you know from the hours of four AM in the morning to twelve noon your body is eliminating toxins?” Brenda winces after taking one sip of the smoothie she just made and ditching it behind the milk carton. “That’s why fruit is the best thing that you can eat. It’s predigested.”
Look, I’m not going to debate the general merits of eating fruit, but this sounds like exactly the sort of logic path people embark on when they need an excuse to eat something intended for livestock out of whichever bucket at Tractor Supply. We’re not quite into full-on science denial yet with the “predigested fruit” and the liver punching in only between the hours of 4AM and 12PM, but that rabbit hole can lead to places both dangerous and strange.
As with the prior tutorials, after teasing a cooking lesson, Brenda swerves and bails. Instead of cooking, Brenda ends up trying to sell us on a diet of fruit, salad,4 raw vegetables, and cardboard masquerading as cereal presumably to avoid the embarrassment of attempting to turn on her own stove. The world would have to wait for the likes of B. Dylan Hollis to experience unhinged 80s recipes.5 Still buying into the allure of the punishment bikini, Brenda attempts to dissuade her female viewers specifically from eating any dairy ever and then the credits roll over a long shot freeze frame of Brenda mid-turn in her living room beneath a massive portrait of her own face, like a trail cam photo by way of Beverly Hills.
Had Welcome to My Home done Jane Fonda numbers and swept the nation rather than getting swallowed by the dark shadows of obscurity for a couple of decades, perhaps Brenda would have put out some follow-up lessons, though it’s hard to imagine what that might have looked like given her reluctance to show us anything beyond her closet and her inability to banter on camera.6 Then again, in the moment Brenda apparently felt everything we needed to know about How to Be Brenda Dickson could be summed up in just over 18 minutes, including credits, and I’d venture to say this is what she got exactly right. Brevity is an underappreciated skill, especially in a future that demands CONTENT. While her makeup and diet tips leave much to be desired, “Leave ’em wondering” is one pearl of wisdom from Brenda Dickson worth holding onto.
- I didn’t find an account from any party involved at the time, but circa 2013 Brenda put out a tell-all book claiming her firing was due to sexual harassment by producer William Bell, whom she also alleges had her blacklisted in Hollywood with help from “Mafia cartel judges and attorneys.” ↩︎
- She was also in Deathmaster (1972), in which Count Yorga is Charles Manson, which is what sparked this Welcome to My Home rewatch. ↩︎
- With apologies to Mommy Dearest fans. ↩︎
- Circling back to pizza, a few years later in the 1990s humanity would invent the Caesar salad pizza, a divine (and apparently somewhat elusive) treat if you love both Caesar salad and pizza. Would love to hear Brenda’s thoughts on this curveball. ↩︎
- Brenda lacks Dylan’s energy, but I’d still absolutely watch her attempt an aspic. ↩︎
- While Brenda seems like a Housewife prototype, her inability to banter or improv probably precludes her from a role on a Bravo reality soap. ↩︎
