The people at Sara Lee - makers of frozen pound cakes, pies, and I don't know what-all else - used to have an advertising slogan: "Everybody doesn't like something, but nobody doesn't like Sara Lee."
Well. That may or may not be true, but this is: Nobody doesn't like Dolly Parton.
You might not be crazy about her music, which goes back to her first hits in the 60's. She was determined to make it big in Nashville, so she got on the first bus to Music City the morning after she was graduated from high school, and it wasn't long before we were hearing her records "Dumb Blonde" and "Something Fishy." The 70s saw her hit hard with "Jolene," "I Will Always Love You," and dozens more.
"I Will Always Love You" was a huge country hit, but when it was covered by Whitney Houston in the 1992 movie "The Bodyguard," Dolly came to the attention of even people who don't like country music (yes, there are some, I know).
The songwriting royalties from the movie using the song have come to - are you sitting down? - ten million dollars. $10,000,000. A ten followed by six zeros, all wrapped up in dollar bills.
So what did Dolly do with this tidy sum? Last week she told Bravo TV's “Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen” she invested in a building located in a historically Black Nashville neighborhood.
“I bought my big office complex down in Nashville, and so I thought, ‘Well, this is a wonderful place to be,’ ” Parton told the show host Andy Cohen.
Cohen and Dolly were talking about her always-positive outlook, and she mentioned how glad she was that she took that movie loot and used it in the Nashville neighborhood called Sevier Park. She said it was the best investment she ever made.
“It was a whole strip mall, and I thought this is the perfect place for me to be, considering it was Whitney, so I just thought, ‘This is great, I’m just going to be down here with her people, who are my people as well,’ ” Dolly said.
She added, “I love the fact that I spent that money on a complex and I think, ‘This is the house that Whitney built.’ ”
I think that it's even more noteworthy that Dolly, the woman who devoted a million of her dollars to developing the Moderna COVID vaccine that so many people credit with saving their lives, waited all these years before casually mentioning this assistance to a neighborhood in need.
Her Dollywood Foundation gives books to kids - it's called the Imagination Library, and kids in it get a book every month from cradle to first grade.
Every kid who graduates high school in her home county gets $500.
After some doofus set a fire that caused gigantic damage in her part of Tennessee, she put together a telethon that raised $13 million to put things back together.
Families displaced by the fire got $11,000 to rebuild.
She gave half a million to the LeConte Medical Center to establish a center for women's services.
This young man Morgan Wallen, with the biggest record of the year and the habit of making a dissolute patootie of himself - I hope he is paying attention. This is how you show your gratitude.
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