What Dolly did with her 80 years
Ten summers ago, on a balmy night in Bangor, Maine, I stood with a beer in hand and my best friend Sam beside me, waiting for Dolly Parton to walk onstage. To be truthful, I wasn’t a fan when I agreed to go. Sam, however, was a mega-fan who had even been to Dollywood, and I’d come along for the adventure.
First thing that struck me was that Dolly had perfect pitch. I have done enough amateur singing to understand just how extraordinary that was. Her banter was also top notch, telling stories and repeating pat lines like “It takes a lot of time and money to look this cheap” in a way that felt fresh and funny. And the way she treated her band, several of whom had clearly been with her for years, with a warmth and respect it would be hard to fake. By the encore, I had begun to see what made Dolly so special.
As you probably know by now, Dolly died on August 25, at 80, after having cancer. But what a run those 80 years were.
On the surface, she was one of the most accomplished women of the last century: singer, actress,* author, philanthropist, the writer behind some of the best-loved songs of the 20th century. A $1 million gift she made to Vanderbilt in 2020 helped fund the earliest research behind the Moderna COVID vaccine, work Vanderbilt’s own team later credited as essential to the effort’s first stages. And if that weren’t enough, she gave away hundreds of millions of books to kids through her Imagination Library.
By most accounts, Dolly also had a genuinely happy marriage. She and Carl Dean were together nearly 60 years, most of it kept out of the public eye by mutual choice. He died last year. Long before that, in her 30s, endometriosis led to a partial hysterectomy and the loss of the children she and Carl had planned to have, followed by two years of depression. She later said that she decided to become everyone’s mom.
Dolly and I probably didn’t share a lot of core values. For example, I would never put the stock in my appearance that she put in hers, decades of wigs, plastic surgery, and rhinestones that require more money and time than I could ever imagine spending. But the person under the big blonde wig was consistent and kind for sixty years in public life. As Dolly once said:
“Find out who you are, and do it on purpose.”
What a life. What a lesson.
*If you have not seen the movie 9 to 5 yet, you absolutely must! It’s a feminist masterpiece. Fun fact: the scratching sound at the beginning of the title song was actually created by Dolly’s acrylic nails.
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