That Time Dolly Came to My Little Wyoming Hometown

Though I’d never met Dolly Parton, growing up in the late 1970s and 1980s, I felt certain that she was one of my tías. There were reasons for this “relationship,” which long predated the parasocial nature of today’s famous people seeming constantly available to their fans via screens. For one: Dolly had notoriously big tetas, just like all the women in my family. So my 3-year-old brain connected Dolly’s chiffon-clad bosom with my mom’s, where I lay my head when she held me in her lap. And Dolly had big-ass, curly hair; hers was white-blonde, and my mom and tías’ was black, but slotting the country idol as an honored member of the Escobedo family coifs was not much of a stretch for a toddler. Most importantly, in 1978, my dad had taken photographs of Dolly. So we had candid, casual pics of her around the house, in which she seemed more like a regular person than an untouchable superstar.

Some important context: I grew up in Cheyenne, Wyoming, which holds a massive outdoor rodeo called Cheyenne Frontier Days every July. In 1972, the planning committee began organizing concerts at night in the 19,000-person rodeo arena. They would set up a stage in the middle of a flat expanse of dirt meant for bull-riding and calf-roping, before carting it out on trucks in time for the next day’s rodeo competitions. But they still needed a way for the musical acts to get from the parking lot to the stage in some dignified way, without being seen. That’s where my dad, an amateur photographer who came from a working-class family of truckers and loggers and loved road-tripping, came in.