A Dolly Parton look-alike contest may seem a little ridiculous, but the New Yorkers who participate in it are very serious about their love for the country music star.
“Dolly is a unifier,” said Jimmy Ray Bennett, an actor who has emceed the contest since it began in 2017. “The one thing that is bipartisan in this country, I think, is Dolly Parton.”
“Dolly Parton is a gift to us all,” said last year’s winner, Shannon Gray. “We are living in a time of a legend.”
Now in its sixth year, the Dolly Parton Look-Alike Contest returns Friday, Feb. 24 to Mable’s Smokehouse in Williamsburg.
About eight grownups – most of them decked in blond wigs, cowboy boots, and the occasional push-up bra – will compete before a crowd of around 150 spectators.
A group of Dolly Parton look-alikes in competition at a previous year’s event.
Megan Love
The event, like the woman it honors, is multilayered: part talent show, part trivia contest, with a dash of beauty pageant.
One year after her win, Gray, a Brooklynite who works in book publishing, can still recite the question that nearly cost her the title: What year was “Jolene” released?
Gray flubbed the answer (1974) and was briefly eliminated. While she left the stage to “lick her wounds” in her husband’s arms, the audience erupted in outrage at her ouster. Gray was brought back to compete in the final round, and went on to win. She took home a dozen roses, a tiara, a $250 gift certificate to Mable’s and bragging rights to the title, which she promptly splashed on her social media accounts.
Gray has watched every movie Parton’s ever been in, and can defend her latest Christmas special, even though she concedes it was “pretty cringe.”
“I still am able to take something away from it when other people may not,” said Gray, “just because I love her so deeply.” (What Dolly was trying to say in “Dolly Parton’s Mountain Magic Christmas,” explained Gray, was that Americans need to find a way to meet in the middle.)
She…
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