What a way to make a livin'

We were all Dolly when we were little - singing into one side of a hairbrush and teasing our hair with the other side and a full can of Aqua Net. We were Dolly before it ever meant butterflies and roller coasters.

I remember watching the Porter Wagner show and thinking they made his sportscoat in VBS crafts; there were that many sequins out of control. The Porter Wagner show was the first place we saw Dolly, but it was only the beginning. She’s tenured now.

All the other musicians came and went. And they all brought hairdos with them that barely lasted past breakfast and were gone by lunch – the Boy George braids, the Mac Davis afro, the David Cassidy Shag, and the B-52’s hive. 

We barely got one rock poster on the wall before another one came to take its place. We made our own 8-track tapes by hitting record and play (at the exact same time or it wouldn’t work) as soon as we heard the first note of our favorite Bay City Rollers or ELO hit. Unfortunately, the DJ would chime in and say a few words before we could hit the stop button at the end. Things like Spotify only existed in some scifi movie that could never really happen. 

Through it all – through all of the 20-minutes-of-fame artists and hairdos – Dolly remained a staple. She wouldn’t let go, so all of America invited her in to stay and park a blonde wig on steroids permanently in the hallways of our minds – 2 doors down to be specific.

Lyrics like these are pretty embedded, too. I usually get through colonoscopy prep by singing 32 stanzas of “Here you come again, and here I go!” And most of my kids have heard, instead of “You are not wearing that out of this house!” the musical version which goes, “Why’d you come in here lookin’ like that?”

And yeah, I sing “Islands in the Stream” as loud as the next Gen-Xer, but I really have no idea what I’m talking about. Most of the streams I’ve been to are barely big enough for one lilypad, but definitely not two islands, even if it is with nothing in between. But I can belt out “From one lover to another, Ah-Ah.”

Don’t try this at home. Somehow when you lean in on your kitchen dancefloor and with longing eyes, say, “Ah-Ah,” from one lover to another, the other lover says, “What? Are you having a stroke?”

In fact, ah-ah was what our two-year-old said to mean, interchangeably, and without contextual clues, either “mama” or “motorcycle.” But when it’s Dolly, we just sing along whether it makes sense or not. “How can we be wrong?”

Which brings me to perhaps her most popular song of recent years’ resurgence: Jolene. Warning! Just go ahead and slam your phone down now because what I’m about to say is a very, very unpopular opinion. 

Here goes. We don’t do Jolene around here. The main reason being that Jolene’s name rhymes with mine, so since 1973, I have heard, “Celine, Celine, Celine, Cuh-lee-ee-eeene,” exactly one more time than “Who let the dogs out?” has been played in junior high gyms at half time across America and the Virgin Islands. 

The second reason is that my mama preached every time Jolene came on the radio. If she said it once, she said it a hundred times. “Well if Jolene can take my man, she can have him!” She preached to us that if any man would succumb to the temptation of Jolene, he wasn’t worth having. She seemed to get madder at that theoretical man in the ballad each time she scraped the carrots over the kitchen trash can, and I was pretty sure if the song didn’t go off the air soon, she wouldn’t even need any electricity to steam them.

So even now, when an innocent round of Jolene breaks out in a gathering of friends sitting around a fireplace with guitars, I can’t. I feel a streak of guilt if I join in “I cannot compete with you, Jolene,” as wide as if I’d just stolen a roll of Certs from K-mart. 

Dolly has had greater longevity in popularity than chocolate. She has had a presence in every decade of my life. All three.

But life is finite. Dolly’s not going to write another lyric or strum another guitar string. Psalm 90:12 teaches us to number our days. 

But while we do, bring out the hairbrush and the Aqua Net.