It is hard to accept the loss of the people we grew up loving and admiring from afar

Dolly Parton: Rhinestones, Grit, and Grace

(from the upcoming book In Her Own Key)

Dolly Parton understood the joke before anyone else could make it.

Dolly knew precisely what people saw when they looked at her, and she also knew how easily they might underestimate the woman underneath all that hair. Her famous look, in fact, was partly inspired by a woman she remembered from her childhood—the local woman everyone else disparagingly called “trash.” Little Dolly thought she was absolutely beautiful: the bleached hair, the makeup, the tight clothes, the whole magnificent production. Years later, when people told Dolly that the woman had been considered “trash,” her response was essentially perfect: “That’s what I’m gonna be when I grow up.”

The hair. The nails. The bustline. The rhinestones. She exaggerated everything so exuberantly that there was almost nowhere left for anyone else to go. Dolly knew precisely what people saw when they looked at her, and she also knew how easily they might underestimate the woman underneath all that hair.

That would be their mistake.

Dolly Rebecca Parton grew up one of twelve children in genuine poverty in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. Her father worked extraordinarily hard but could neither read nor write; her mother filled their crowded home with songs and stories. Dolly carried both of those influences with her for the rest of her life.

The poverty entered her songwriting without ever becoming an invitation to pity her. “Coat of Many Colors,” based on the little coat her mother made from scraps when the family couldn’t afford a new one, may be the clearest example. Dolly wrote about poverty without shame, longing without self-pity, and heartbreak without surrendering her humor.

Underneath the sparkle was one of the great American songwriters. “Jolene.” “Coat of Many Colors.” “I Will Always Love You.” My own previous band loved playing “Jolene,” and it is one of those songs that reminds a musician how little a great songwriter actually needs when the melody, story, and emotional tension are all doing their jobs.

Dolly was also a musician herself, playing guitar and banjo—and somehow managing both with those fingernails. As a guitar player, I find this no small accomplishment. Watch her wonderful song she performed for Johnny Carson, and keep an eye on those nails on the guitar fretboard. From my understanding, she changed many chord structures to make them possible to play with the long nails. And…she was quite a great gee-tar picker.

Those nails actually became an instrument on my favorite Dolly Parton song, “9 to 5.” While making the film, Dolly began clicking her acrylic nails together to imitate the sound of a typewriter while she worked out the rhythm of the song. The clicking was eventually incorporated into the recording itself.

I loved 9 to 5 when it came out, and I think it deserves to be regarded as something of a milestone. Here was a mainstream comedy starring Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton that confronted sexual harassment, sexism, workplace inequality, and the infuriating ways competent women were routinely dismissed by men in authority—and it was really funny. More than four decades later, I am not sure many films have managed to confront those issues with the same combination of anger, intelligence, and genuinely convincing humor.

Dolly was wonderful in it. She was also wonderful years later as Truvy in Steel Magnolias, another role that made excellent use of the qualities people sometimes mistook for mere fluff: warmth, flamboyance, humor, and considerable steel underneath.

And we cannot discuss Dolly Parton’s image without acknowledging her long-standing connection to gay culture and particularly to drag. Really—look at her. The towering wigs, rhinestones, enormous nails, exaggerated curves, and glorious theatrical femininity practically constitute a drag vocabulary of their own. Drag performers embraced Dolly for decades, and Dolly embraced them right back. More importantly, she repeatedly expressed support for her LGBTQ+ fans and rejected the idea that her Christian faith gave her license to judge other people’s lives.

That generosity seems to have extended well beyond the stage. In 1995 she founded the Imagination Library, inspired in large part by her father’s inability to read and write. What began in her Tennessee home county eventually grew into an international program that has put hundreds of millions of free books into the hands of young children.

As an English teacher, I find that almost impossible not to love.

I was genuinely pleased when Dolly was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2022. She initially resisted because she didn’t consider herself a rock artist. Eventually she accepted, appeared with an electric guitar, and performed “Jolene” with an absurdly wonderful collection of musicians that included P!nk, Brandi Carlile, Sheryl Crow, Pat Benatar, Annie Lennox—and Rob Halford of Judas Priest.

Dolly Parton and the Metal God.

Civilization occasionally gets things exactly right.

I was never the greatest Dolly Parton fan in the world, and it would be disingenuous to pretend otherwise now. Country music has never occupied the center of my musical universe.

But I always liked her. She was nothing if not warm-hearted, always jovial, and well-spoken. She also had excellent comic timing.

Farewell, Dolly. The world will miss you.

Tim Curry: ANTICI—-PATION

When I was fourteen, somehow The Rocky Horror Picture Show became a huge part of my world and consciousness. I remember sitting in the Grove Cinema, antici—pating the moment when those enormous red lips would appear on the screen.

Rocky Horror helped define what it meant to me to be “alternative.” Certainly its gleeful disregard for conventional ideas about sexuality and gender was part of that, but so was the fact that the film itself seemed almost homemade. It was strange, low-budget, irreverent, and wonderfully imperfect. People laughed at it, shouted at it, dressed for it, threw things at it, and returned to see it again and again. The audience became part of the movie.

And at the center of all this magnificent nonsense was Tim Curry.

I had such a serious crush on him. I could not imagine anything more enticing than those fishnets with the leather jacket. Those polka-dotted high heels stomping as he descended in the elevator forewarned an epiphany of cinema.

Curry didn’t merely play Frank-N-Furter. He committed to him. There wasn’t a trace of apology in the performance. Frank strutted, seduced, pouted, commanded, murdered, sang, and occasionally threw himself onto the floor. Curry somehow made all of it seem perfectly reasonable.

And that voice!

That gloriously exaggerated upper-class English diction became as essential to Frank as the corset and fishnets. I imitated it endlessly. Probably badly. Curry’s pronunciation could make an ordinary syllable sound vaguely indecent.

But the importance of Frank-N-Furter went well beyond a funny voice and an extraordinary pair of legs.

I was fourteen years old in the 1970s. There simply were not many mainstream cultural spaces where a young person could encounter something so cheerfully unconcerned with conventional gender and sexuality. Rocky Horror didn’t cautiously introduce its differences and then ask the audience for approval. It threw open the castle doors and essentially announced: Here we are. Deal with it.

For a great many young people who felt different in one way or another, that mattered.

And it was funny.

I don’t want that part forgotten. Rocky Horror wasn’t a lecture about liberation. It was a ridiculous, sexy, campy, science-fiction rock musical with a homicidal alien in a corset. Somehow that was considerably more persuasive.

Curry, of course, was much more than Frank-N-Furter. That became increasingly apparent as the years went by. He could be frightening, absurd, sinister, elegant, lecherous, pompous, or completely ridiculous—and frequently several of those things at once.

He was Rooster Hannigan in Annie, Wadsworth in Clue, the terrifying Pennywise in It, the Lord of Darkness in Legend, and King Arthur on Broadway in Spamalot. He was nominated for three Tony Awards, including one for playing Mozart in Amadeus. He also recorded three albums and spent decades doing voice work, where that remarkable instrument of a voice could create an entire character without the assistance of fishnets, horns, clown makeup, or anything else.

Still, for me, everything comes back to Frank.

Years later I listened to a wonderful Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross in which Curry was captivating. He was intelligent, funny, articulate, and a marvelous storyteller. What struck me was the contrast between the thoughtful man speaking into the microphone and the gloriously excessive characters he had inhabited. There was nothing accidental about those performances. Behind all that flamboyance was an extremely intelligent actor making very precise choices.

In 2012, Curry suffered a major stroke that left him partially paralyzed and using a wheelchair. He nevertheless continued working, particularly as a voice actor, and continued appearing at events and celebrations of Rocky Horror. Last year, fifty years after the film’s release, he published his memoir, Vagabond.

There is something touching about the affection with which his colleagues are remembering him now. Susan Sarandon described him as funny, sexy, original, warm, and generous; Richard O’Brien, who created Rocky Horror, remembered him as both a distinguished performer and a wonderful man.

Tim Curry died on August 25, 2026, at the age of eighty.

I suppose actors never really know what they have given individual members of an audience. Tim Curry certainly couldn’t have known about one fourteen-year-old girl sitting in the Grove Cinema, waiting impatiently for a pair of enormous red lips to appear.

But I remember her.

She was about to see something she hadn’t seen before: a world that was strange, funny, sexual, theatrical, irreverent, and entirely unapologetic about any of it.

And then an elevator descended.

First came the polka-dotted high heels.

And there was Tim Curry.