In Defense of Being Silly

Art of being silly, philosophy  of Dolly Parton, and being myself always 

What the great blonde women of our time have taught me 

I have a theory about the women people look up to. It says a lot about who they are.

Most of mine happen to be blonde.

Dolly Parton. Goldie Hawn. Miss Piggy. Sabrina Carpenter. My mom. My Aunt Janet.

Obviously, hair color isn't the only thing that ties these women together.

It's the way they light up a room. It's the sense that things are about to get more fun simply because they walked into it. They care for everyone in a way that makes everyone want to be best friends with them but also be like them at the same time. 

They're invited to things because everyone knows it would be boring without them. And perhaps most importantly, it's their refusal to tone it down, even when the annoying people try to put them in a box.

They are not afraid to be a little ridiculous. And they are not afraid to laugh at themselves—or, more precisely, to laugh first. 

A very specific kind of woman gets called "a lot," usually by someone who isn't enough himself.

No one has taught me this more than Dolly.

Big hair, big tits, and big dreams

When Dolly Parton passed away recently, my phone started filling up with texts.

“I'm sorry about Dolly.”“Thinking of you.”“I know you're probably devastated.”

And honestly, it made me laugh a little. Not because her death wasn't sad, but because it was so obvious that Dolly had become my person. And I clearly talked about her a LOT.

Somewhere along the way, without ever meeting her, I had made her a kind of proof of concept: that you could be a joke and never be the joke. That you are too busy being yourself to care about the haters around you. 

There are so many Dolly memories rattling around in my head that I couldn't rank them if I tried. The first was when I turned on the Disney Channel, and she was an aunt of my favorite pop-star role model.

Technically, Miley Cyrus's godmother, which means the woman who raised Hannah Montana, taught her half of what she knows about turning yourself into a character from Dolly herself.

It was like watching my own family on the screen.

The more I dive into who she is, the more I relate and am inspired to be her.

There's also the story of Dolly modeling her entire look after the town tramp because she thought the town tramp was the prettiest, most glamorous thing she'd ever seen. That's a woman who took something meant to shrink her and turned it into a costume she chose for herself.

And man, do I love a good costume. And that is something we both could relate to.

And there's the image I come back to most: Dolly with those long fake nails, somehow still finding a way to play guitar and sing "Jolene."

Dolly's origin story inspired me to never dim myself to change the best parts of who I am, especially when it comes to my art. When she first showed up in Nashville, executives and critics didn't take her seriously—they looked at the wig and the curves and decided that was the whole story. So she wrote a song about it.

As a writer, I can definitely relate to this. Someone fucks you over, you write about it.

Her first single was called "Dumb Blonde," and the hook told everyone exactly where they could put their assumptions: this dumb blonde wasn't anybody's fool. She'd go on to say, decades later, that the jokes never landed because she knew she wasn't dumb—and, as she liked to point out, she wasn't even really blonde. That's the whole move. 

Take the insult, own it faster than anyone else can throw it, and turn it into a punchline you're in instead of a wound you're hiding.

That's the trick, I think. The big hair and the big everything else were never the absence of self-awareness. It was the fullest expression of it. And the whole point of being a silly person: the joke is on them.

But the silliness was never the whole picture, either.

Dolly refused to be hard in a world she loved as hard as she did. Don't be cruel in a cruel world. Believe in love anyway. She was kind to herself and kind to everyone else, which sounds simple until you notice how rare that pairing actually is—most people manage one or the other.

She knew herself well enough to choose not to have kids, and said so plainly, which is its own kind of lesson: that knowing exactly who you are, and building a life that fits that person instead of the one you're "supposed" to want, is its own quiet act of self-respect.

Maybe that is what I loved most about Dolly. She never stopped being silly just because the world expected her to be serious. 

Maybe there’s more to being silly than we give it credit for.

Why We’re So Afraid to Be Ridiculous 

I definitely feel like silliness is misunderstood.

We use silly as an insult. It can mean something doesn't make sense, that someone isn't being serious, or even that they're being foolish. It almost always carries a bit of judgment.

But I don't think being silly means any of those things.

I think silliness is a way of moving through the world. It's being willing to find humor in things. It's letting yourself be a little ridiculous. It's not needing every moment to have a purpose or every version of yourself to be perfectly polished.

And I think Dolly understood that better than most people.

She never seemed afraid of looking ridiculous. In fact, she seemed to understand that there was power in being the person who was willing to go there first.

Undercover boss: sometimes a diva needs a break 

From being an activist, a singer, a writer, and an icon, you can imagine that Dolly could get tired.

She was an advocate for everyone, and I mean everyone—not the curated, safe version of “everyone” that a lot of famous people default to. She cared about people in a way that always felt genuine, and I think that says a lot about who she was behind all the glitz and glamour.

And through all of it, her husband, Carl, stayed almost entirely out of the spotlight for nearly sixty years. I find that fascinating. It is rare to watch a marriage where the less famous partner doesn't seem to need the world to know his position or compete for the frame. A man not jealous of a woman’s success—shocking.

He just let her be the whole sun and seemed completely fine with it.

One of my favorite things about her, though, has nothing to do with rhinestones at all.

Dolly started the Imagination Library, mailing free books to kids every month from birth to age five because her own father never learned to read. My children's book, The Worry Wags, exists in the world. I hope that the program builds—kids growing up around books instead of around the idea that they weren't meant for them.

And there's one more thing that fascinates me: the art of being unfamous while being one of the most famous people alive.

Dolly was super smart. She built an entire persona bright enough to be seen from space and then quietly guarded a private self behind it—proof that being “a lot” in public doesn't mean you owe anyone access to all of you.

Pretty Until They Have Something to Say

Dolly is loved by everyone now. But it wasn't always that way. There were doubters.

There was Jolene, herself a warning about the kind of woman people assume can't help stealing what isn't hers—and Dolly wrote her a whole ballad instead of a diss track, because even the woman she was afraid of was treated with grace.

I think that's part of what makes Dolly so interesting to me. She was never afraid of being misunderstood. She knew people would make assumptions about her, and instead of changing herself to fit them, she kept going.

Growing up, I didn't expect to end up so similar to my mom. I honestly wanted to stray away from the things that made me so similar to her.

Maybe because I was told they were too much. Or that certain qualities didn't fit into the rooms I thought I was supposed to be in.

The older I get, though, the more I realize that maybe those qualities weren't things I needed to grow out of. Maybe they were things I needed to grow into.

The loudness. The silliness. The big personality. The willingness to make a joke out of myself.

Dolly didn't become less Dolly to make people more comfortable.

And maybe I don't have to become less me, either.