rss feedHow is Dolly Parton Like a Dolly?
Posted by Michael Musto at 9:00 AM, July 24, 2008
As I've noted, my column this week deals with the wondrous Dolly Parton and the descent of her orbs on Broadway. (Well, her music anyway. She's written the score for 9 To 5, based on the Dolly/Jane/Lily movie, which is coming at ya in April.) In person, Dolly—who's a petite creature with lots of hair and chest—looks sort of like a backwoods Barbie doll. In fact, she has a song called "Backwoods Barbie" which is on her CD and in the show! And now, I've learned that she has the perfect Barbie doll proportions, kinda sort of. In a touring play by Sherry Kramer called When Something Wonderful Ends, Barbie is a running theme and Dolly enters into it, chest first.
In the play, Kramer says: "If Barbie were a real person, her measurements would be 40-18-32. The closest living human with those proportions is—yes, Dolly Parton, except Dolly is a tiny little thing. Barbie, if made to scale, would be over six feet tall. But Barbie's bizarre, impossible body is not an insult to all actual women—it's a necessity. When Barbie is dressed, the elastic and cloth around her waist is just as thick and bulky as the elastic and cloth would be on a skirt around ours, but Barbie is one-hundredth our size. So the huge, impossible breasts balanced on the tiny waist stacked on top of a sliver of hips is not about body hatred or female form revulsion, even though it would later become, probably, a cause of it."
I knew it! Dolly Parton's physique is a necessity! Even as a gay man—or maybe especially as a gay man—I always felt that was the case! But did you know Toby Keith has the exact same measurements as KLAUS Barbie?
