Well, it may have not been greatness, or maybe it was depending on your perspective…

My wife, daughter and I were traveling to Oklahoma City last week to spend the weekend with my family, celebrating an early Christmas. After waiting in the glorified sardine can that is Terminal B at Bush Intercontinental Airport, our airplane finally arrived some 20 minutes late. After the plane emptied, the last passenger was offloaded in a wheelchair. Being the impatient traveler that I am, I had positioned my family close to the door in order to rush the gate and get on the plane (I know, like it really matters, since everyone gets to the same destination at the same time). None the less, we moved forward just in time to be nearly hit by the wheelchair and its occupant, none other than Little Richard. How can I be sure it was Little Richard you ask? Blue velvet jacket, jet black bouffant hairdo, pencil thin mustache, RayBan sunglasses, and a posse of handlers…enough said.

So, that’s pretty cool, I got to see Little Richard. Probably would have died not having seen him in person otherwise. However, it doesn’t end with Little Richard.

After spending a couple of days with the family, we headed back to the airport in Oklahoma City for the return trip. While waiting to board the plane for the flight back to Houston, I noticed a couple of different groups of folks that didn’t seem like your typical travelers. One was a group of not too gracefully aging Brits, mostly in their fifties, dressed in styles that one wouldn’t typically associate with OKC. The other group was doing their best to project the image of a hard core rap group, and were pulling it off very successfully. When preboarding was being announced, the gate agent announced early boarding for families with small children (that would be my family), folks needing extra time down the ramp, and the rock group Foreigner. What!? That’s right, my wife, daughter and I were mingling with the iconic 80’s stadium rockers Foreigner on the jet way. I’m still not clear why they got to preboard. Granted, they’re old, but not that old. And its not like they were having to escape legions of adoring fans that were causing a scene. No, if not for the fact that they had “rock” hairdo’s (or at least they were trying, most were balding pretty bad so the styles looked more mullety than anything) and some being dressed in all black, or some wearing goofy looking boots, or too tight t-shirts pulled over bulging guts, you really couldn’t tell that they were anything other than strangers to fashion norms of OKC. I even confirmed with the gate agent on my way through boarding to be certain that they were who he said. I hate it when I’m not sure that I’m hanging out with famous people, like the time I may or may not have been having drinks with Michael Bolton…

The rap group didn’t get to preboard. They loaded on with the rest of the crowd. So as they did, I tried, unsuccessfully, to establish just how famous they were. Each of them wore a blinging necklace with a huge “icedout” pendants with what appeared to be small “m”s on either side of a big “T”, all encrusted in diamonds or rhinestones or something. Two of them had full “grills“, otherwise known as a mouth full of gold teeth, each tooth studded with, again, a diamond or rhinestone or something. For all I know, they could have been hugely famous, but I don’t follow rap music enough to know.

So, after the flight took off, with me sitting right behind Mick Jones, the founder of Foreigner, I listened to him and his road manager discussing the fact the rappers were on the plane. The road manager seemed to know who they were and was obviously not a rap fan. I was half expecting some sort of rocker/rapper rumble at 30,000 feet, but, alas it never happened. That would have been a good story.

Out of curiosity, I googled around to see why Foreigner might have been in OKC. Turns out they were playing at a casino in Oklahoma and were on their way to Beaumont to play at the civic center there. Looks like the days of playing Wembley Stadium are long gone.

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