Sitting Next To Little Richard At Denny’s In Hollywood

Keith Walsh
An Idea (by Ingenious Piece)
2 min readJun 11, 2022

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It was 1986 — 5 years after we graduated high school. My brother Philip, along with some of our friends, maybe Jeff, Tony, Rich and Kurt, were cruising around in LA. Maybe we had seen a movie. I don’t remember, these are hazy memories. After all our cruising, we stopped at Denny’s on Sunset Blvd., the famous spot where legends were sometimes known to grab a burger.

Photo by Nathan DeFiesta, Unsplash.com

We were ushered to a booth by the hostess. It was all beige and tan, like Denny’s were in those days, designed to reflect middle class values, durability being one of them. My middle class self was hungry, tired. In the booth next to us, was what I thought was a Little Richard impersonator. He looked just like him, sitting with a few young ladies in their 20s, all in fancy dress. They were amused at his spell of stories.

Photo Of Little Richard by Alan Light, 1988.

Cognitive Dissonance
Little Richard — the piano and vocal great who started in the fifties and inspired so many, with his boundary-breaking success as an African American rock pioneer and singer songwriter. It had to be an impersonator. Had I known it was the real deal, I would have listened harder, paid more attention. Philip and his friends remained low key, a sign of their college educations and good taste. No one seemed overly excited or thrilled.

But Little Richard! Oh my God. A young David Jones (along with his half brother Terry) had been so inspired by his live performance that he took up the saxophone and started a career in music before changing his name to David Bowie.

A couple weeks or months later, I mentioned to my brother that it was funny how we had sat for an hour or more next to a Little Richard impersonator. Philip corrected me: he was more than likely the actual Little Richard. How differently I would have acted had I understood at the time!

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