Post

This girl I used to waitress with in Austin, we moved to New York together in 2003 on a literal Greyhound bus. Shared a fifth floor walk-up studio that, when it rained, had more leaks in the ceiling than we had pots and pans. We used to get drunk and smoke off the fire escape and do “sad-offs.”

A sad-off is when you go back and forth playing sadder and sadder songs at full blast until you’re both too inconsolable to play another. Dolly Parton’s “Down from Dover” won the whole tournament. One of the most light-hearted people to ever live gave us the saddest song in the world. Thank you.

A two-story barbecue restaurant in Times Square “took a chance” on me because I aced the barbecue fundamentals test without having to study. All the other servers were aspiring Broadway, including this gay blond guy in his thirties who loved Dolly so much that when I told him about the “sad-off”

winner, he said “Which version?” Whew. I didn’t even know about 1970. Wikipedia was just a tiny baby then and hadn’t gotten to “obscure Dolly Parton” just yet. I asked him once why he loved her so much — because he really loved her, like interrupted-you-every-shift-to-talk-about-her loved her —

and he said when he was a baby he had terrible colic. Cried day and night. His mom was a young military bride, all alone on a base in Germany, and tried everything she could to help her baby feel better — swaddling, rocking, different formula, long walks, tummy massage — but he was inconsolable.

Until one day she put on a Dolly Parton record and voilà he was calm and quiet. Not sleepy, eyes wide open, mouth agape, taking in the voice of (to his mom, anyway) a literal angel.

That was how the rest of his childhood went. His dad away blowing something up, him and his mom at home, happy and loving and listening to Dolly. When he was all grown up and pursuing his Broadway dreams, they went on their ultimate dream vacation together, to Dollywood. And she was there.

“So there I was,” he told me by the first-floor POS station, “telling Dolly about the colic and the military base and my poor young mom, and I can barely get the words out because I’m crying so hard. I’m hyperventilating…

“And she pulls my head down to her enormous breasts and starts gently patting my back, going, ‘I know, honey. I know. Just let it out.’ “Can you believe it?! Dolly Parton comforted me through the experience of meeting Dolly Parton!”

And in all the thousands and thousands of times I sang along to “Down from Dover” over the years, never once did I think that maybe that song was preparing me. Not for the heartbreak of your man leaving, but for the shock and force of holding my own stillborn child.

Sometimes in those early crazy days afterward I would lay there in silence and wonder if I had jinxed my baby by brewing him in a body that savored the saddest songs. Who knew all the words to “Down from Dover” (both versions).

I didn’t know then, and maybe Dolly didn’t either, how common stillbirth was. Babies didn’t die “as their way of telling” mom she needs to grow up, or repent, or stop indulging foolish fantasies, or anything in particular, really. Sometimes babies just die.

I don’t know. Maybe Dolly did know. I’m always struck by how Dolly wrote so well and sang so beautifully about motherhood without ever becoming one in the traditional sense. “She was a mother to all of us” is so treacly you’d think it was a line in “Light of a Clear Blue Morning,” but it was true.