The Lookalike Contest

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a small crowd, a small stage, and somebody about to lose)

[Verse 1]
She heard there was a Dolly Parton lookalike contest on in Los Angeles
and the contestants were mostly drag queens and it sounded like a nice evening,
so she over-exaggerated — her word — she put more on. More lashes. More beauty mark.
And she got in the line with everybody else and she went up on the stage.

[Chorus]
And she LOST. She lost a Dolly Parton lookalike contest to a man in a wig.
She said she got the least applause of anyone who walked out there,
and she came off that stage and she was, by every account she ever gave,
absolutely thrilled about it, for the rest of her life, at every opportunity.

[Verse 2]
Because think about what that requires. Think about the security it takes
to walk into a room of people impersonating you, compete, come last,
and treat it as the single funniest thing that ever happened to you,
and then tell it on television for forty years without ever once sounding wounded.

[Chorus]
And she LOST. And she loved the queens. She loved them loudly and early
and at a time when it cost something to do that in country music,
and she never made a speech about it, she just kept showing up,
and the queens loved her back, and they are still doing her, tonight, everywhere.

[Bridge]
There is a version of fame where you cannot bear to be imitated
because the imitation is a critique and the critique is unbearable.
And there is a version where you enter the contest.
She entered the contest. She came last. She dined out on it for four decades.

[Outro]
(the crowd applauds — for somebody else)
She lost.
She told everybody. Every single time.