5 Feet of Fury

You know that scene in ‘The Color Purple’…?

Where Oprah makes some snotty remark to a white family and ends up paying for it the rest of her life, ending up battered and broken?

You know that scene in Ragtime, where white guys pick on the black guy for driving a fancy car, and wreck it?

Of course, those are both works of fiction.

Which probably helps explain something that’s puzzled me for a really long time:

How the hell an obviously gay (and insane) black guy who wore makeup and hairspray, banged on a piano and screamed about loving either teenaged girls or Jesus wasn’t either locked up or lynched — but became (if not rich, alas) pretty damned famous, and is still alive at age 77.

Weird.

PS: before you feel too bad about Little Richard getting ripped off, blame it on the Karma Police…