Remembering Dolly, Tim and the grief that shapes how we experience them now
I’ve spent the last week watching movies and shows I haven’t had occasion to watch or revisit. But the recent deaths of celebrities brought them to the forefront of my mind. Losing Dolly Parton, Tim Curry and Peter Cullen in the same week has me considering what their representations brought to the world. Whether of characters or of themselves in the small windows we were afforded through what they shared with us while they were alive. And in the same week the world has lost others with smaller notoriety. But still in the public eye. An old musician, a man in his 50s losing a battle to meningitis, a South Korean actor mostly known for support roles in Kdramas.
These people affect our lives because we see the stories they bring to the screen, the characters they play. The music they make. The voices they provide with considerable planning and intentionality. The way they make their stories feel human, earnest and whole.
The thing about grief when the world loses someone on whom it has paid its attention is that we cannot know the true reach of grief any more than we can know the true reach of representation. Fiction can build it for us. The consequences. The seismic loss of a quiet pillar of a society that didn’t know how much it built around that person. How much that person mattered. We can sit with their child. The camera can linger on a conversation between community members about what their favorite memory of them was. We can see how much there is love and it can persist. For months. For years. You can feel the undercurrent of that loss in the actors’ performances. Its echo.
But in life, I can only know about this grief we’re all processing by reading an article, watching an interview or something they created and left behind for us to love.
The ones who knew them
I can talk to a friend in Tennessee who can tell me that the air is heavy in the state at the loss of an icon. I can even know that Miley Cyrus, Dolly Parton’s goddaughter, had a deep and genuine relationship with her and I can imagine a semblance of how she might be experiencing this loss. But I cannot encapsulate it. I cannot know her day-to-day. I cannot feel what she feels when she wakes up in the morning and she can’t call the woman who said to call her her Fairy Godmother since she was a child. The woman who encouraged her, who helped name her, who built her up in an industry and world determined to tear her down. I can imagine how the people who knew her are feeling this. And I can see how the world is taking it. But I’m still only being given approximations. Cultivated apertures of a life lived.
The things they made for us
This week my stepdaughter and I watched projects featuring Dolly Parton and Tim Curry. Productions that they were present for, where they made friends, did multiple takes of the same line, and built stories for us to enjoy and see a new person within. I watched 9 to 5. There is the demographic representation element. People are more expansive than their stereotypes would have you believe. The high-level corporate assistant is far more fanciful than you would think, the recently divorced woman who has only ever been a housewife is far more adventurous, and Dolly’s character, the attractive, busty secretary carries a gun in her purse and has to dodge sexual harassment attempts by her boss to keep her job.
These are all true of what representation brings. But more than that, representation expands a person. It tells you more of who they are, how people can behave in strange and uncomfortable circumstances. How they come together and support each other rather than continuing to believe flattening lies. You can see how they, against all odds, even when defeated, find that they have made a real difference. How they celebrate with champagne and giggles, planning their next move for how they can continue to move that needle. Then be interrupted by someone who they weren’t expecting and burst out laughing together, raucous as they had been upon letting themselves enjoy each other the first time they stopped believing the lies the office had built around them.
We watched The Wild Thornberrys for the telltale voice of Tim Curry’s Nigel Thornberry excitedly, albeit distractedly, waxing poetic about an elephant or saying insane statements that no one else could randomly just say like “I can feel the grebe in my veins. He’s searching for wildlife interaction and footage of a great crested grebe. A water bird. He’s searching for a water bird. And that’s how he says it. And there is such strange delight in these little artifacts left behind by the people who make us these stories. Such small moments they hardly thought about that can bring uncontrollable giggles to a family who needs that right now. Even as I think about his passing, I can’t help but enjoy all the celebratory strangeness he brought to the world.
And sometimes it’s smaller than we think. I spent the rest of the week watching tribute videos and behind the scenes footage wherein they were interviewed throughout their lives. These videos reminded me of how little we even think about the way these people, their characters, their stories impact us. And when we lose them, it becomes the thing that defines them for us. And the thing is, we all have a different focus, a different aperture on what stayed with us.
The ones who idolized and worked with them
I scrolled through countless short-form videos celebrating their large contributions to society. How their particular gentle and genuine loud weirdness changed the world, but one that really made me stop was a choked up Dan Povenmire talking about how just after losing Dolly, now losing Tim Curry, it’s been a lot. He reminisced fondly on the memories of going frequently to The Rocky Horror Picture Show and then expressed how grateful he was to have gotten far enough in his own career to have been able to work with Tim Curry, the one time they gave Perry a human voice in the main show, Phineas and Ferb.
Then he rolled the clip. Perry the Platypus being taunted by Doofenshmirtz as always. Perry is masquerading as a professor who wrote a book. He has on a disguise with glasses and a mustache and he’s sweating as Doofenshmirtz challenges him to read the book aloud. He starts the recording in his backpack and it’s Tim’s voice, dramatic, silly and unique as it always has been. Perry mouths along to the words as the recording suddenly starts skipping, the voice of Tim Curry tripping again and again saying the same word over and over again as Perry tries to convince Doof that he is a real professor, not his platyperson nemesis.
Dan was tearing up. This small interaction with a person who was such a hero to him, a man who has spent his life building stories that delight children and adults alike, and inspired him to do the same, stayed. And it stunned him. All Dan could do was celebrate Tim and love him with the rest of the world. Contributing to us a small lens of how he was able to experience him.
The ones who felt seen
I also saw that one of my favorite YouTubers, whom I’ve been watching for over five years, Samantha Lux, did a Dolly Parton’s LGBTQ legacy tribute. Samantha is a transwoman. And from the start of her channel she has always had the same intro. She invites people to subscribe and says “Go ahead, I’ll wait.” then clicks her acrylic nails together patiently, it’s like a stim that starts the routine of her videos. In this video she started to do it and she started to play her acrylic nails like Dolly famously did for her 9 to 5 song recording. And started to sing as the video transitioned to a small old clip of Dolly smiling, laughing and showing her talent of playing the instrument of her nails for the song. That was such a small thing. But to Samantha, who was a transgirl finding her femininity and how she wanted to express it, this moment made Dolly someone who changed and supported her, even though they never met. She later talks about what Dolly’s existence did for her life.
“When I was growing up, I was not allowed to express my femininity so to see somebody on TV who was kind of like pushing back at the jokes that people would make at her expense was so foundational for me.” This young kid looking at Dolly Parton, extraordinarily expressive with a femininity Samantha was not allowed to inhabit, not only owning her look. But the big boobs, big hair, long nails, that unabashed sharing of her self with the world, it mattered to Samantha.
Not in a gigantic way. Not even in a way that maybe she could have easily realized it without ruminating on what Dolly Parton meant to her for this video. But in a way that really stayed with her, in the way she presents herself. “I remember seeing her on Hannah Montana with her long nails and her big hair, we all know what she looked like. And I feel like it was really the start of something special with me at least. I still think of her like picking the lock with her nails. Inspired my nails, for sure.” Samantha remembered fondly.
Samantha Lux brings something to the world that makes the world feel a bit lovelier. And it appears that such a legacy is carried forward by the smallest influence of Dolly Parton showing her what she was allowed to be.
How they carry forward
And that’s the thing about grief, especially around deaths of celebrities. There is so much minutiae to consider for what infinitesimal thing they did for the world beyond all the large-scale things they did. And we find it, sometimes when we’re not even looking. Not even thinking about them. We hear their voice in a recording. Feel the way they might have responded to something as it happens and it feels like we lose them all over again. Not in the stark, desperate way it felt the first time. In the gentle dull thud of a heart still beating, still here. Still without them. Still earnestly living a life affected by who they were to us. As they remain, as-ever a part of the fabric of our lives. Crucial in how it’s been spun, whether they knew us or we ever truly knew them.
The moments they made for us, they echo through time beyond and give us something, maybe even something new, that we never considered. Because that’s the nature of celebrity. The nature of grief and the nature of art and representation. It carries forward and shows us something again and again and again no matter how many times we allow ourselves to sit with it. It always has something more that it wants to say.
#LetThemEatCrow #RepresentationSavesLives #TheApertureOfGrief #DollyParton #TimCurry #SamanthaLux #9to5 #TheWildThornberrys #PhineasAndFerb #Representation #Grief #Particularity
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