I’ve been “Dolly-adjacent” – in the same room as, or outdoors in the proximity of, the national treasure that is Dolly Parton, on a couple of occasions. Once I even conducted a phone interview with her, me from the then-Sun Gazette World Headquarters location of Dunn Loring (looooong ago!) and she from her home in Los Angeles.
As you would expect, she was a delight on that call, even though I was a nobody and she must have to do dozens of these every month. In fact, everybody I’ve ever talked to who knows her says she’s as genuine as you can get. (Gotta love a woman who coined the immortal line: “It takes a whole lot of money to look this cheap”…)
On Wednesday night, I had a Dolly Parton dream. Nothing untoward, but definitely strange.
In the dream, she and I were walking out of a school or auditorium, something like that, and she said to me, “I need to get to [unintelligible], would you mind driving me?”
(Would I mind driving Dolly Parton? It would be my pleasure!)
“OK,” she said. “I just have to grab a few things and will meet you in a second.”
And then things took a nefarious turn. For the entire rest of the dream, until Albert the Wonder Cat nudged me awake at 4 a.m. to ensure I would be ready for his 5 a.m. breakfast, I was looking for Dolly, but she was nowhere to be found.
Talk about neve-wracking. I would be a national pariah (more than just the local pariah I am now) if I somehow LOST Dolly Parton!
Anyway, Dolly, if you’re reading this, love you and hope you’re OK. And if I’m in the vicinity of Pigeon Forge (Tenn.) this summer, I’ll be sure to drop by the Dollywood theme park and spend the afternoon.
(When I worked for the Myrtle Beach Sun-News of the now-defunct Knight-Ridder newspaper chain, I drove over to Tennessee to cover the annual opening of Dollywood one year. The resulting article and my photos ended up everywhere, from the Los Angeles Times to the Philadelphia Inquirer to the Miami Herald to the New York Daily News. People, indeed, love Dolly!)
BETTER LATE THAN NEVER: They waited a tad too long, but credit where credit is due – the Arlington County Board is going back to in-person meetings tomorrow.
Given how much I’ve bitched about government being slow to get back to normal, it would be fair to assume that I’d be there to mark the occasion.
Well, no.
It’s just that it’s so much easier, for news-coverage purposes, to wait until the meeting has concluded and then watch it on YouTube, scrolling past the parts that are extraneous to my needs. All the news from a five-hour meeting can be extracted in an hour, if you know what you are doing. And I do.
I’m guessing in-person turnout will be low-low-low, because those who participate in these meetings have been conditioned over the past 15 months to an online existence. But good to get back, nonetheless.
- Scott McCaffrey