Select Essays
This whole world's wild at heart and weird on top. ~ Lula
One day while walking by the river I spotted a single rower peacefully sculling across the water just before sundown and realized that’s where I wanted to be. I didn’t want to try to keep up with other people. I needed to find my own pace.
After seeking spiritual guidance in the Parton songbook, I chose to ask Dolly about a pivotal period in her career that was controversial at the time but seems all but forgotten: In the late 1970s, Parton masterminded a plan to catapult her into the highest levels of superstardom, something she called a "universal star."
What She Hasn't Got:
An Apology For Sinéad O'Connor
At 23 years old, she steps to the microphone. “It’s been seven hours and 15 days since you took your love away.” The audience responds by singing the backup melody line, and she swans through the rest of the song with the devotion of an artist willing to molt right there in the light, writhe out of her own skin, explode into aura.
It’s been over three decades since the release of 9 to 5, the cult comedy that brought together Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin with Dolly Parton in her film debut as Miss Doralee Rhodes, a kind-hearted secretary who fantasizes about lassoing her “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot” boss and roasting him on a spit.
Beyond popular longevity, the subversive nature of the classic rags-to-riches story-song has helped it achieve a unique place in country music and American culture at large, where “Fancy” is simultaneously an anthem for the country music establishment—and the very artists the industry has historically shut out.
Middle- and upper-class feminist activists may have realized that the personal is the political, but country women have always seen the political in the personal, and addressed the fight for equality on those terms.
There were four or five of them. Maybe six. I remember the way they deferred to their leader, a twenty-something guy who looked entirely too old to still be in college. He made it clear that I was going to follow his orders. He was smiling and enjoying himself, a campus king upon his crappy college-apartment armchair throne..
A couple years ago, I saw Isaak headline — if you could even use that word — at the Harrah’s Casino in Chester. I sat in the front row (obvi) on a metal folding chair as a horde of elder ladies rushed the stage, photographing him with those ridiculously giant iPads no one should use to photograph a concert, ever. This is the thing: he wasn’t worried about being cool. He wore his 35-pound suit of tiny mirrors like the handsome human disco ball he is and played some of the best Californified rockabilly this country has ever produced.
In Midnight Baby, adults are foreign dignitaries imbued with too much power to sustain positive relations. Sensitive and emotionally starved, Dory struggled to peel the skin off adult words to get at their true meaning.
Illustration: Steve Krakow