Dolly Parton and Tim Curry passed away last week and it got me wondering:
- Why did their deaths resonate so much publicly in a world full of consistently more terrifying breaking news?
- Why was I so personally thrown for a loop by the loss of two people I didn’t really know even if I had once been in the same room with each of them on two separate occasions? (Note: More on that later).
- They were both 80 years-old and, well, isn’t eight decades a good enough run for us fans? Especially when they’ve reached the height of their professions? How much more time do we realistically expect? Of them or in life?
Too existential?
Lucky you because I’ve always thought this way.
Imagine the expression on my parents’ faces when at the age of six I relentlessly questioned them about what happens after you die (Note: Heaven wasn’t good enough) and how a bump in my mother’s stomach could possible mean the start of life in a few days for my new brother or sister?
No wonder they got divorced before I fully entered my teenage years and was really able to bring down the entire room and all of us in it.
But back to Dolly and Tim and how it relates.
I’m no expert but I did love them both and do think a lot. Especially about this kind of stuff.
They were quite different but did share one quality.
They were the elixirs to such dramas. And thoughts. And fears.
A kind of cure to the quiet desperation lurking silently in all of our young, troubled, or on the surface untroubled though secretly turbulent, thoughts.
They did this by being honest.
Through their talents. Their songs. Their performances.
They rose to fame by playing characters who told you it was okay to be the part of you that embarrassed you. The part you were ashamed no one would ever understand. The qualities everyone would see and look down on you for. Or perhaps hate you for.
Dolly Parton became an international icon not only as a performer but as an entrepreneur and philanthropist. So much has been written and you can read about a lot of it here.
The 100 million records sold. The 3000 songs written. The 300 million free books gifted to children. The many million dollars donated to charity and medical research, including helping to save humanity at the very beginning of the Covid pandemic by co-financing Moderna vaccine research. The hit movies and the closet full of awards.
But at the end of the day they all seemed to spring from a kind of clarity about who she was and what she felt.
Famously apolitical and a woman of faith, she was nevertheless for decades baited into back-pedaling about her support for the LGBTQ+ community. But she never once wavered. “If you’re gay, you’re gay, if you’re straight, you’re straight, and you should be allowed to be how you are and who you are,” she said.
The answer came in various forms, even as recently as 2023 when her home state of Tennessee enacted a series of anti-transgender legislation.
There’s a direct link from here back to what was her favorite of all the songs she wrote, Coat Of Many Colors.
Having grown up “dirt poor,” it recounted a story based on the coat her mother had stitched together for her out of colorful rags that she thought was beautiful but that her schoolmates relentlessly laughed at and shamed her for.
She wasn’t ashamed. Instead she set the story to music for public consumption and spent her life determined to never shame anyone the way people tried to shame her.
Tim Curry starred in numerous plays and films and become a different kind of international, yet enduring, icon, for one particular performance in one very specific film and stage musical, The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
The 1975 cult classic has become the longest running movie of all time, still playing in several hundred theatres internationally in mostly late-night shows. It centers on a brilliant, pansexual, transvestite mad scientist doctor from the planet Transsexual who is unabashedly sexually liberated and honest about it to anyone who happens to cross his path. This includes a very square, unsuspecting couple from the Midwest who wander into his castle one rainy night.
The sight of Mr. Curry sauntering off an elevator in his platform shoes, swathed in a cape, then picking his spot and revealing himself in full corset, jewelry and fishnet stockings that compliment his overly theatrical makeup, is still a sight to behold.
But you can only imagine what it was like at movie theatres in 1975, and on the stages of London, LA and NYC two years before that.
Nothing prepared you for how honest and unashamed the actor was in the skin of Dr. Frank-N-Furter and how he fully he brought the reality of the lyric, “don’t dream it, be it,” to the screen.
Dolly spent a lifetime both on and off the stage doing this in a variety of ways. And in one performance as one particular character Mr. Curry inspired authenticity in multiple generations (Note: And counting) of young people.
I should know. I was one of them.
There’s been a lot written about the many lives of Rocky Horror and you can read about some of it here.
But I can tell you that as a not-yet “out” gay person in the late 1970s, Mr. Curry and his brood were part of the inspiration for unabashed self-acceptance. Not only for what they were showing us onstage but how their campy, fun-loving approach to performance and love was affecting those of us in the audience.
I mean, if they could have sex with either sex (Note: And anyone in-between) and dress as all or part of any sex – and then inspire so many of their peers to do so – the least we could do was be honest with ourselves.
Is it any wonder that I went on to see Rocky about a dozen times at midnight shows in five different American cities by the time I turned thirty? And never got tired of it?
Notoriously private, Mr. Curry never publicly came out as gay or pansexual, though he did drop a few clues along the way. That is his prerogative.
Still, the real truth about the themes of Rocky Horror are not to be found with him or anyone else in the cast.
Rather, they abound in the revealing and riveting documentary focusing on both the project and its writer-composer-co-star, Richard O’Brien. It’s called Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror” (2025) and is available on Amazon.
Directed by Mr. O’Brien’s son, Linus O’Brien, it unlocks key truths about the Rocky phenomenon that I never knew or had even considered.
And that is: Mr. O’Brien, a tall, gaunt, balding and now bald performer conceived the piece not only because of his love for B science fiction movies.
But because he had spent his entire life battling that feeling that he was both part female and male.
Speaking honestly and emotionally, the father of three children and the husband in three heterosexual marriages, says he considers himself 30% female and 70% male, and sees gender on a degree scale for most people rather than being set in stone at one end or another.
When all these years later his own son points out to him how much of what his father considered just a “fun” project helped change the lives of so many young people and continues to do so to this day, we watch his father try to suppress tears in his eyes as he becomes in his own words, “unusually” emotional.
It’s a real sight to behold. And evidence of another enduring observation.
You can never know how beneficial and liberating it can be to live in your truth.
Both to yourself, and for the world.
Tim Curry – “Don’t Dream it, Be it”
Dolly Parton – “Stairway to Heaven”
P.S. – I saw Dolly Parton in concert in the early 1980s when she was on tour with her big crossover record, “Here You Come Again.” She was so delightful and accomplished that I had no existential thoughts for many weeks after.
P.P.S. – I saw Tim Curry enter a dark screening room in the mid 1980’s yet somehow I knew it was him. But I have seen Dr. Frank-N-Further, the guy/gal he first embodied, everywhere, and in every year of every decade since.
