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The Dolly Parton Look-Alike Contest returns to Brooklyn for its sixth year
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Kerry Shaw
Published Feb 19, 2023
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Courtesy of Meghan Love
By
Kerry Shaw
Published Feb 19, 2023
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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.
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 laughs at the idea that she won a prize for what she calls her “useless knowledge” about Parton. And yet, Gray said, she takes pride in being “a part of anything that would be a mere drop in the legacy that is Dolly Parton.”
Growing up in Raleigh, North Carolina, Gray said that – as a self-described “petite, buxom” person – seeing Parton changed her life.
“She was the only person who looked like me,” she said. “It made me feel less alone.”
But then, she said, “the more I learned about her and followed her career, the more I fell in love with her as a person.”
In the five-and-a-half decades since Parton’s first hit “Dumb Blonde" topped the charts, her rags-to-riches tale and celebrity status have taken on mythical dimensions.
Shannon Gray, the winner of the 2022 Dolly Parton Look-Alike Contest.
Courtesy of Shannon Gray
Parton, who was born in 1946 in a rural town in the Smoky Mountains, was the fourth of 12 children. Her parents had so little money that they paid the doctor who delivered her with a sack of cornmeal. Before she turned 14, Parton was performing at the Grand Ole Opry; she recorded her first album in 1967.
She has since opened an eponymous theme park, helped deliver more than a million books to help children learn to read, been honored as an LGBTQ+ icon and donated $1 million to help fund development of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. Last year, she was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. She’s even been honored with her own limited edition MetroCards.
“She's just this icon that just keeps getting better and better,” said Meghan Love, who owns Mable’s Smokehouse, which hosts the contest. “Who doesn't like Dolly? If you don't, you're un-American, or you're not human or who knows what you are.”
Love said she was inspired to create her version of the contest after seeing one in the movie “Urban Cowboy.” Similar events take place all over the country.
In fact, Parton herself has participated in a Dolly Parton look-alike contest. She told Harry Connick, Jr. – then dressed as Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka – that she once showed up to a Dolly Parton look-alike contest in Los Angeles, as “an overexaggerated Dolly,” but lost.
Fans of the Brooklyn Look-Alike contest say it draws a diverse crowd, ranging from “drag queens to country music fans, to people looking to have a good time” according to Gray.
Brooklynites and Dolly Parton have something big in common, said Gray. The borough, she said, is filled with “people who have left where they were because they wanted something better for themselves and they respect that in Dolly Parton.”
Ultimately, said Bennett, the look-alike contest is about having a good time, “whether you know every word to ‘Jolene’ or not.” He paused. “But everyone knows every word to ‘Jolene,’ so we don't have to worry about that.”
Mable’s sixth annual Dolly Parton Look-Alike Contest is Friday, Feb. 24 at 9 p.m. Tickets are $25. It’s free to enter, and organizers are accepting Dolly look-alikes.
Tagged
comedy
brooklyn
Kerry Shaw
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