Earth Day 2009: Consider the Dolly Parton Paradox

The Gatlinburg area of Tennessee is Dolly Parton country, and I've been thinking about her ever since our trip. I think that someone could write a fascinating book of about ambivalence and the ecology of popular culture, with Dolly Parton as the central figure. (And oh, what a figure: over the years her breasts have gotten larger, and her hips have disappeared.) I just read her Wikipedia biography, and I'm starting to think that my answer to the question "If you could have dinner with anyone on the planet..." might just be Dolly Parton.

But if I did win a contest to have dinner with Dolly, I wouldn't necessarily want it to take place at her Dixie Stampede, where we had supper last Saturday night with the Sounds of South choir in Pigeon Forge. That meal is not one for foodies, Slow Food types or even someone like me who enjoys using silverware. It's a 21st century Roman spectacle with floor show on the dirt floor of a huge arena. Designed to accommodate 1000s of guests, a contest takes place each night between Confederate and Yankee sides of the audience, dramatizing the "friendly rivalry" played out in the Civil War. (No mention of slavery, or even of casualties.)

There are horses, flaming hoops, longhorn cattle, racing pigs, and kids chasing chickens. The show begins with an invocation of Indian lore (the Indians, we learn, lived in a "land steeped in legend" – whenever anything is "steeped" in anything, especially legend, you can bet that's a bad sign –) and ends with a giant Dolly on a screen, leading us in a patriotic anthem. Dolly had the "We aren't red states or blues states: we are the United States" theme going before anyone had ever heard of Obama. At one point there's a game of horseshoes, the contestants pitching toilet seats. The whole hillbilly thing: embrace the ignorance! The pleasure is that of becoming infantilized: we are small children again, at the enormous breasts of a loving Dolly. (Her latest album is called "Backwoods Barbie").

The food ("a 4 course extravaganza!"): all the Pepsi you can drink, potato soup, cornbread, a complete chicken for every plate, a slab of pork, baked potato, GMO corn-on-the-cob, and a flakey, fakey apple turnover. No flatware: you just dig right in with your greasy fingers, while whoopin' and hollerin' for either North or South. The experience did have its moments, I must admit.

Dolly thinks big. I was trying to imagine the original brainstorm and business plan for this dinner theater concept, and then I tried to imagine the Stampede kitchen, the life cycle of the 1000s of chickens and pigs, the lifestyles of the performers, the impact of Dolly Parton on the Smoky Mountains, or on country music....it's all more than I could put into my head at one time, or into one blogpost, certainly. Dolly has a large reach in the social imagination, and a huge eco-footprint. One of the ways she's given back to the region is to help fund a proposed hospital and cancer center in nearby Seiverville, Tennessee, in the name of the physician who delivered her. During our trip to Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg, I kept wondering about hospital and health care for the thousands of people there, many of whom look as if they eat only the Standard American Diet (SAD) of sodas, nitrate-laced meats, empty carbs, trans fats, not too many plants, and lots of sugar (yes, that was our 4-course meal).

She also launched a literacy program for kids called Imagination Library; it now serves one out of every two children under the age of 5 in Tennessee, and has programs in other states, the UK and Canada. Children (and perhaps more importantly, parents) receive books in the mail each month until they are 5: the first one is my old favorite, The Little Engine That Could. (A perfect title for Dolly.)

Dolly Parton seems to have insight and a sense of humor about her own body and her cultural significance: she says "Don't let these false eyelashes lead you to believe/that I'm as shallow as I look/for I run true and deep." From the childhood home described as "a rustic, dilapidated one-room cabin in Locust Ridge, a hamlet just north of Greenbrier in the Great Smoky Mountains of Sevier County" (where she was the 4th of 12 children), to "country" dressed up as Dollywood, Dolly is nothing if not democratic. Just compare her childhood to that of the 13 offspring of Cornelius Vanderbilt, something Dolly probably did, growing up just over the holler from the 250-room Biltmore in Asheville. There's a story here about class (and Class) in America.

As Elma, Savannah's bus driver, put it while giving the choir a tour of the Smokys, "Dolly is a genuine, giving, kind-hearted woman, but she is very artificial." Interesting.

Here is Dolly singing "Jolene" in one of her early television appearances, in 1974:

Road Trip to Food Co-ops in Lexington and Asheville

Ahhh...home again after an adventure. We took a little road trip behind the bus filled with Sounds of South choir kids, who were performing in Gatlinburg, Tennessee last Friday. Sav has collected a few hundred photos of the kids on the bus, in the town, and in the Smoky Mountains. Here is just one of some of the gang.

Andreas and I made our own meandering way, with a first stop in Lexington, Kentucky, where we had lunch at Good Foods Market and Café. We had a chance to visit my friend Anne Hopkins, the general manager, and Danielle Dove, the new marketing manager.

It's great to have a network of co-ops across the country, mixed in there with the Subways, Short Stops, Cracker Barrels and such. For a map and a list go to NCGA.coop. There's more to come: visit Food Coop 500 to learn how to start a food co-op in your community. There isn't one yet in Gatlinburg, only a very crowded and chaotic Food City.

We drove through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to Asheville, North Carolina on Saturday to visit the sweet brick French Broad Food Co-op there, across the street from Laurey's, where the philosophy is "Don't Postpone Joy." It's right across from The Orange Peel, a Social and Pleasure Club, too: a nice scene there in Asheville, Cornelius Vanderbilt country.

In the rain on Sunday we circled back to Good Foods, where the café was hopping and the food was was fantastic. Kale, berry pudding, fresh butternut squash ravioli, lima beans with delicious herb seasoning...you can't find these things at the big boxes or chains.

All along the road (alongside the shops selling "Genuine Antique Reproductions") the redbuds and dogwoods were in bloom. It was the perfect moment for a trip to the Smokys – except for that endless bottleneck at the car show in Pigeon Forge!

Road Trip to Pigeon Forge and Beyond

We're just back from a 3-day road trip to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, through Pigeon Forge, where there was a huge car show on the main drag. I hardly know what to say about this, except that it is a fairly stunning experience to literally crawl through town in a traffic jam that lasts for hours, past hundreds of cars with their hoods up in the parking lots, their owners sitting on lawn chairs, just chatting and drinking sodas and watching the traffic inch past.

I saw a lot of orange vehicles and was reminded of the time when Jack was small when we used to play "Orange Car!" and get extra points for spotting one; they were so unusual. But not in Tennessee.

If I were more into cars, and wanted to buy a vintage vehicle of some kind, especially an orange car, then Pigeon Forge would be the place for me. As it was, I was more or less aghast, thinking about the impact of all of those vehicles and people on the surrounding environment.

Here's a video from YouTube (also at this link), with music by Throttlerod, "Hell and High Water," that gives you a sense of the Pigeon Forge Car Show. It was posted by Justin, self-confessed car addict, 20-year old store clerk at Kroger who also loves drawing pictures of cars. (He has posted a few videos of his car drawings, too.) The images in the video must have been taken near the beginning of the show (which ends on Tuesday), as they don't really show how absolutely jam-packed everything is there on the main drag of Pigeon Forge (and for miles and miles at each edge of town).

Yup, that's where we were. Yee gads, and yeehaw! It only takes a bit more than 4 minutes to watch the video, but it took as long as 4 hours (or more) to inch through Pigeon Forge the past few days.