Grass-Roots Imagination

Frontdesk July 2003
by David Waggoner

Eighties retro: Blondie, Dead or Alive, even Dolly Parton’s making a comeback! Actually, Dolly (this month’s cover story) never needed new packaging; she’s always been bigger than life, and biggest of heart–witness her many charitable efforts on behalf of those who need her assistance. When B. Andrew Plant first approached me about doing a cover story on Dolly, I was a little skeptical. Wasn’t Dolly Parton a walking and talking cartoon character, someone who was so famous that there was little we didn’t already know from the tabloids and late-night talk shows?

Doing good and doing well are not always the common denominator in Hollywood, Nashville, or Broadway. But here’s a star who spends a great deal of her own personal wealth doing things like underwriting the award-winning AIDS Quilt documentary Common Threads; who buys books and bookshelves for kids through her Imagination Library program in Sevier County, Tennessee. What better way to increase AIDS awareness than through establishing literacy programs for underprivileged youth?

It’s always been my contention that the HIV/AIDS epidemic has gotten out of control because people don’t know how to speak to each other. In 1987 I co-produced an early rap record targeting minority youth that was funded by the U.S. government, only for the master tape to be confiscated and the discs never pressed because the song’s content (or language) was deemed offensive.

So I switched gears, and picking up on my background as a magazine editor at Brown University, I knew I couldn’t offend if what I was editing would never see more than a few thousand souls. Well, I was wrong, and as A&U has grown into a non-profit publishing phenomenon that reaches hundreds of thousands of HIV-aware Americans every month, it’s finding some pretty well-known readers on Capitol Hill, in the theater, and on the back lots of Hollywood. Perhaps Jesse Helms has read it too; it doesn’t matter who does, as long as they keep their minds as open as possible.

And that’s why Dolly makes sense, too. And why Mr. Plant had it right the first time when he mentioned that you can’t get a much bigger and much more honest spokesperson for the AIDS crisis. While I don’t know if Dolly Parton has ever gone on tour in Africa, it wouldn’t surprise me if she would if she were asked. She regularly donates her over-the-top Dollywood theme park as a place for those in need to seek comfort, relax, enjoy a few rides, and communicate about the human side of living with HIV/AIDS. What more can you ask of a celebrity these days? Dolly Parton wears her ribbons–pink, yellow, sequined, and yes, even red–on her décolletage, where, I suspect, quite a few of us have stared. Let’s just hope this big-hearted generosity won’t go unnoticed, and that other country stars will stand up and take up the cause.

As the twentieth anniversary of the discovery of HIV as the cause of AIDS is marked this July, maybe it should be on all our minds about how we can take Dolly’s message of taking responsibility for our neighbor’s welfare to heart. With no cure in sight, prevention is the best medicine. Taking care of oneself is a subtle form of AIDS activism. Not to become infected if you’re HIV-negative, and not to infect others if you’re positive–that is the message that Miss Parton wants to convey.

Dolly’s brand of AIDS activism begins innocently enough with introducing reading skills to disadvantaged youth through her Imagination Library program. With the ability to read, perhaps prepubescent youth will save their lives by knowing more about HIV/AIDS: What it is, and what it isn’t. How it’s transmitted, and how to prevent it. And most importantly, as Dolly told A&U, "maybe one of my kids will grow up to be a doctor who is smart enough to find a cure for AIDS." Imagine that!