My Happy Place

Caption: [One time I was on a plane watching Carol because it was available so of course I was watching it. And the guy next to me was watching Billions and the episode he was watching Paul Giamatti was ball-gagged.

But in the version of Carol they were showing on the plane, it had been edited so that the two main characters never even kiss. When I saw this, I got pissed. I bought like five minutes worth of internet and I sent one tweet that said like, "Delta has removed the kisses from Carol. Looks like a movie about two best friends who go to Iowa".

Somebody who followed me at the time, a journalist who wrote for a lesbian blog owned by MTV, picked up this tweet and wrote about it. Like Cameron Esposito notices there's no kisses in Carol. But then because it was owned by MTV, the story went wide.

Like MTV proper wrote about but then the Entertainment Weekly, and the Hollywood Reporter, and Out Magazine. And pretty soon Huffington Post, CNN... was blasting out headlines like "Sky Lesbians Demand Kisses". It was just me.

Shortly after the success of The Buddy Program, Parton learned in dealing with teachers from the school district that problems in education often begin during first grade when kids are at different developmental levels. That year The Dollywood Foundation paid the salaries for additional teachers assistants in every first grade class for the next 2 years, under the agreement that if the program worked, the school system would effectively adopt and fund the program after the trial period.

During the same period, Parton founded the Imagination Library in 1995: The idea being that children from her rural hometown and low-income families often start school at a disadvantage and as a result, will be unfairly compared to their peers for the rest of their lives, effectively encouraging them not to pursue higher education. The objective of the Imagination library was that every child in Sevier County would receive one book, every month, mailed and addressed to the child, from the day they were born until the day they started kindergarten, 100% free of charge. What began as a hometown initiative now serves children in all 50 states, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, mailing thousands of free books to children around the world monthly.

On March 1, 2018 Parton donated her 100 millionth book at the Library of Congress: a copy of "Coat of Many Colors" dedicated to her father, who never learned to read or write.