There’s really only one way to give an acceptance speech at the 25th-anniversary party for Bust magazine: talk about your vagina. At least this was Erykah Badu’s plan on Tuesday night at House of Yes in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where she accepted a Golden Bra Award for her work as a singer-songwriter, D.J., actress, and longtime activist.

It started from the very beginning of the speech: “I’m on my period. Right now, I got a fuckin’ pouch full of blood, and I’m so very, very honored and happy to be here.” Those opening lines, as well as the subsequent shout-out to her own vagina, got the whole room of her fans cheering. But it was Badu’s later tribute to her 91-year-old grandmothers, Viola Wilson and Thelma Gipson, that really had the attention of the full room, consisting of mostly women and a smattering of Bust-supporting men:

I would like to thank my grandmothers for letting me go outside with no shirt on, when everybody said that it could not be done. They let me do it. I always wondered why the boys could do shit the girls couldn’t do. And my grandmother said, ‘Fuck that! You do whatever you want to do. You be whatever you want to be. And you better encourage other people. You better make sure that when you say something, it means something . . . And if you can’t say something nice, come sit by me.’ Y’all get it? ’Cause my grandma liked to talk shit.”

Badu’s speech followed a three-hour-long evening of celebration. Hosted by comedian Jenny Slate, who admitted to being a “nerdy” fan of Badu’s, the evening also awarded 2 Dope Queens’s Phoebe Robinson and The Vagina Monologues playwright Eve Ensler. Badu finished off the night with a D.J. set under the name DJ Lo Down Loretta Brown, after giving one final piece of advice to the “children” in the crowd: to have five doctors in their lives. She prescribed them as follows: Dr. Sun (30 minutes a day), Dr. Nutrition (“eat the right shit!”), Dr. Sleep (“take your motherfuckin’ ass to sleep sometime”), Dr. Exercise (cardio, walking, “stripping—it’s fine,” Dr. Spirit (“whatever it is you pray to”). She also added that “Dr. Feel-Good,” Dr. Sex, was not a bad professional either. “Get laid, but remember, ladies: also get paid!”