In ninth grade, Jawauna Greene snuck out of the house to go across town to roller rink Rhythm Skate on Reisterstown Road to see The SOS Band (this might be the most perfectly ’80s sentence I have ever written). Unfortunately, she had no ride back, and by the time she returned home, it was 6 a.m. Her mother was not pleased.

“She was sitting at the table with a cup of coffee, ready to kill me,” Greene said. “There was that feeling of getting home and having your parents sitting up like, ‘You done made a mess.’ I went out for big fun in Baltimore. That got a lot of people in trouble back then.”

The most famous casualty of that fun was Vanessa Huxtable (Tempestt Bledsoe) from “The Cosby Show,” who, 35 years ago, lied to her parents about going to Charm City to see her favorite band, The Wretched. Through the most sitcom-y of circumstances, she and her friends get caught and her mother, normally staid lawyer Clair (Phylicia Rashad), unloads on her in a scathing monologue, articulating our city’s name as if it’s a curse word.

“The way she said it! ‘Big fun in Bal-TEE-more!’” Greene recalled. For her and a lot of other people growing up here at the time, hearing our hometown’s name on the lips of a television icon, even in anger, was startling and cool.

“It was shocking and weird in the sense of, ‘That’s my city!’” said Calvin Coates, co-host of the video podcast “All Things Black” and my former Baltimore City College classmate. “Come on down, Vanessa!”

Joe Gutberlet, who was 10 at the time, said he was ”hardly surprised to hear Mrs. Huxtable saying ‘Baltimore’ in the same breath as ‘big fun,’ because our city has always been big fun. How lucky to grow up thinking that everyone’s heard of Baltimore and, of course, they’d want to come here,” he wrote in an email.

The moment was so epic that artist Juliet Ames, who you may know as the salt box lady, painted one of her signature bright yellow works of art with Vanessa’s pained visage. It’s one of her favorite boxes, and a “deep cut” she knew “Baltimoreans would get, even if no one else did.”

The mention of our town, down to the concert’s location at the then-Baltimore Arena, hit a familiar note with many of us, but Clair’s outburst hit home even more. We saw our own moms. And it was frightening.

“She [Clair] was so demure, but she became a real-life Black mother in that moment,” Greene said. “There was a scolding, a loving, ‘I’m worried about you, concerned something happened to you, but you pissed me off. I’m two seconds from laying hands on you, but I won’t. The humiliation is worse than anything I could have done to you.’”

Coates once forgot to leave his mother a note that he was going out to the popular teen night at the massive P.T. Flagg’s club at the Inner Harbor. “She snatched me by my collar and said, ‘You don’t leave out of here without telling me,’” he remembered.

Now that we’re all parents, we truly understand that Clair’s rage was undercut by fear that her child was not where she was supposed to be, out there in the mad world where she could not find her.

I had my own coming home in the wee hours moment when I was 21. I was too embarrassed to call my dad to come get me from the house party where my boyfriend and buddies were too drunk to drive me home. The look on his face was panic replaced with anger and disappointment. I’m so sorry I did that to him.

“This journey we are on, this parenting thing, is no joke,” Greene said.

It goes without saying that “The Cosby Show,” as pivotal as it was for many of us, has not escaped the taint of its creator, who was convicted on several counts of sexual assault but eventually freed after it was determined that his rights to due process were violated. (I still think he did it.)

“It sucks because it used to be such a comfort show, and Bill Cosby ended up being a bad person,” said Ames, who boasted that the former comedian is the only person to ever block her on Twitter. “We still appreciate the good parts of ‘The Cosby Show.’ That’s why we have to have big fun.”