Does anyone want a hot dog with some cooked onions and mustard? Because Aretha Franklin surely did!

Jill Scott shared a wild and very on-brand Aretha Franklin story, and the lesson she took from it is one she still carries today. During an interview on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” Scott recalled the first time she met Franklin and said the late Queen of Soul immediately sent her on an errand: to get her some hot dogs. Scott said she was stunned by the request, but she still went and got them. 

“You met her, you told her you loved her, and then she said what?” host Tonya Mosley clarified. 

“‘Go to the corner and get me two hot dogs with cooked onions and mustard,’” Scott recalled. “And I went.”

According to Scott, the encounter happened when her music career was already on the rise. She told Mosley that she believed she had the number one album in the country at the time, yet that did not stop Franklin from putting her to work. Scott said she brought the hot dogs back and waited, though she does not think Franklin even ate them. 

Looking back, Scott said the exchange gave her a different perspective on how legacy and respect can work in the music industry. Rather than taking the moment personally, she said she now sees it as a kind of test. “You gotta earn your stripes,” Scott said, adding that she now understands the interaction as Franklin’s way of sizing her up. 

“[Back] then I was like, ‘Aww, I wanted her to be nicer to me, to embrace me to tell me, you know, give me some advice and hold my hand a little bit, but that’s not what happened.” 

Scott also said she sees a little bit of that same “auntie” energy in herself now that she has reached a similar place in her own career. She did however tell Mosley that one of the lessons she learned from that moment was to “be nicer to be people.”

The internet, of course, had thoughts. Some commenters defended Franklin’s approach as a form of tough-love mentorship, while others argued that asking someone to run an errand like that was just plain rude. Still, for Scott, the memory seems less about the hot dogs and more about the lesson: sometimes the legends want to know whether you can handle serving before they hand you the mic.