There is a particular kind of magic that happens before the camera starts rolling… The ring light hums. Pop music plays. Champagne glasses clink. The glam team works with practiced excellence. The soft window light does exactly what it’s supposed to do. And somewhere in the middle of all the simultaneous preparation, a famous quote from Dolly Parton plays rent-free in your head.
Well honey, nobody knows what’s around the corner, but I know one thing. If you keep yourself out of the game for fear of losing, there is no way on this earth you’re gonna win.” Dolly Parton
If Once Upon a Dollhouse has a patron saint, it’s Dolly Parton. Long before “main character energy” was a phrase, Dolly was living it in rhinestones. She’s spent a lifetime being unapologetically, joyfully, femininely herself and turning that into an empire.
The higher the hair, the closer to God.”
Which is really just Dolly’s way of saying: take up space. Be a little much. Let your femininity be as big and as bright as you want it to be – it was never something to shrink.
Find out who you are and do it on purpose.”
Every extraordinary woman I’ve ever admired is really just a woman who figured out this one line and committed to it.
I look like a woman, but I think like a man, and in business, that seems to work to my advantage.”
A reminder that softness and shrewdness were never opposites. A woman can be dressed head to toe in pink and still be the smartest one in the room.
Being a woman – a Doll – is the whole point. That’s the thread running through everything Dolly’s ever said, and it’s the thread running through this entire Dollhouse: being a woman is not a limitation to work around. It’s the point. The lashes, the hair, the pink, the softness. None of that ever made a woman less serious, less capable, or less powerful. If anything, it’s the exact thing that makes her impossible to ignore.
There’s no such thing as an ordinary life. Whether you’re a mother, an artist, a dreamer, or a woman simply trying to build something beautiful out of her one wild life, you get to decide that your story is worth telling. You get to decide your version of extraordinary.
Nobody knows what’s around the corner. Not Dolly, not me, not you. That was never the part we were promised. The only part that was ever up to us is whether we play.
So wear the lashes. Take the picture. Tell the story.
You can’t win a game you refuse to play, Doll.