Once, when Keke Palmer was a little girl, she asked to have Cheerios for dinner. Her parents told her no: They had already prepared a meal for the family, and besides, cereal was for breakfast. “If you don’t eat the dinner,” her mother advised, “then you’re going to be hungry.
” “That’s OK,” the 4-year-old said, calmly turning and retreating to her room. A few hours later, at 4 a.m.
, her mother went downstairs to use the bathroom. She found Keke there, asleep in her nightgown with her head resting on the kitchen table. “Mom,” she said as she looked up sleepily, “can you give me my Cheerios?” Sharon Palmer laughs as she tells this story, which seems, at first, like your standard cute anecdote, tossed off to humanize a famous daughter — an example of how stubborn kids can be in the pursuit of their desires, proof that years before she became a child star, Keke knew how to get what she wanted.
But think about it, and it becomes something more. This is a story about a girl who wanted something, was told she couldn’t have it and managed to keep her emotions in check. She didn’t throw a tantrum in protest.
She didn’t eat a dinner she didn’t want just because she was supposed to. She absorbed the information, took a beat, weighed her options and then came up with a viable plan to get those damn Cheerios. It’s a template Keke Palmer has been following ever since.
A few years later, when Keke was 10, she, her parents and three siblings would move t.