For two years in my early twenties, I had the great honor of working 9 to 5 cleaning toilets for the person who penned that very tune.
Seriously, I was Dolly Parton's houseboy.
I had started a cleaning company (well, printed some business cards and put them on the bulletin board at Kroger) only two weeks earlier, and I got a phone call from Ira Parker who wanted me to come on a Thursday and give a quote for a weekly cleaning. She told me to bring some help, and plan on staying all day, if the price was right.
So I enticed two unemployed musician friends with $60 cash and matching Kmart polos to join me for a day's work. All I knew was that there were 23 rooms and it could turn into a weekly account.
We pulled into the pea-gravel driveway and parked beside the tennis court, as directed. The back door led into a beige, brick-floored kitchen where we were greeted by Ira Parker whose real hair looked like it could have been the inspiration for one of her boss' famed wigs.
I'll never forget the moment I realized whose house it was. Just off the kitchen was a very small office with lots of light. On the desk was a 5x7 photograph of the entire cast of Steel Magnolias seated around the film's director, Herbert Ross. This was clearly not a press photo, but a candid shot.
Suddenly, I realized I was in Truvy's house.
For the next two years, Dolly would remain my best client – every Thursday at her Brentwood house from 10-5 and most Tuesdays cleaning the bus, the office or the lake house. She also introduced me to Rhonda and Trace Adkins who became my Fridays.
The house had three floors with an elevator, a salon, a massage room with a hidden door, a game room complete with the first Dolly Parton pinball machine made and high-pile carpet which we raked with a carpet rake before we left at the end of the day so that no footprints showed. This was also very helpful for telling which rooms hadn't been touched all week.
Her Rolodex was, to my estimation, the most impressive thing I had ever seen – home phone numbers, in her handwriting, for James Garner, Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson, who at that time, she shared a New York apartment with, I was told.
When I started Celebrity Limousines with a business partner in 1997, Dolly shared several cards from that Rolodex and wrote us a letter of intent from her companies and pulled strings to get one from Sony Music which helped gain the financing for the first two limousines.
She remains the most generous and genuine boss I have ever had. Even though my favorite answer to her directives was often, "Reba would never treat us this way".
As her Imagination Library now reaches the children of Vance County, I'm in awe of what she has accomplished. In 2003, I produced the Governor's Awards in the Arts at the Ryman Auditorium where we honored Dolly. In the dressing room, she met then-Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen (Democrat now running for US Senate) for the first time and pitched him hard on state appropriations for the young organization while he giggled like a school-boy.
She then went on stage and told the sold-out crowd that she was so proud to meet the new Governor in her dressing room and she couldn't wait to "See if he's gone put his money where his mouth is".
In case you're wondering, he did.
This article first appeared in The Henderson Dispatch.
