I RECENTLY DECIDED to spend a quiet Sunday re-watching Dolly Parton’s underappreciated 1982 classic The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas while cleaning my house. I love Dolly, so I may be biased, but it’s truly fantastic from start to finish. Parton stars as Ms. Mona Stangley, the rhinestone-bedazzled madam of a small-town institution whose secret love affair with Sheriff Ed Earl Dodd (played by Burt Reynolds) poses some serious conflicts of interest.
Though the film lightly touches on significant issues, like the legality of sex work, for the most part it’s pure fun and sweetness, the cinematic equivalent of a loaded banana split—at least until any of Parton’s jaw-dropping musical numbers. The Best Little Whorehouse is often recognized for the scene where she tenderly serenades the Sheriff with “I Will Always Love You,” but on this particular Sunday it was a different song that wetted my eyes.
I won’t spoil anything, but toward the film’s end Ms. Mona gets the rug pulled out from under her and suffers a devastating loss. Cue Parton’s drop-dead gorgeous performance of “Hard Candy Christmas”: “Me I’ll be just fine and dandy,” she sings, “Lord, it’s like a hard candy Christmas/I’m barely getting through tomorrow, but still I won’t let sorrow bring me way down.”
2016 dealt us blow after gut-punching blow—we’ve witnessed the police murders of dozens of black Americans, the mass killing of patrons of the LGBTQ Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, the judicial victory of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge militia mere weeks before law enforcement sprayed Standing Rock water protectors with water cannons in freezing weather, elected a true-blue bigot to the US presidency, and lost some of our most treasured icons, like Prince, Bowie, and Sharon Jones.
Right now, things are not normal, and the forecast for 2017 looks neither fine nor dandy. But as I sank to my kitchen floor, mop in hand, Parton’s words sounded like a rallying cry: Get through tomorrow. It’s a simple lyric, but hearing her strength and resilience when I really needed to muster my own was probably my most definitive musical moment of 2016. CIARA DOLAN