One of the world’s greatest treasures… Dolly Parton.
I’ve told quite a few of her greatest stories before, from the time she was mistaken as a prostitute in New York City, to turning her husband Carl Dean down the first time he asked her out, to having her first kiss while playing spin the bottle, she doesn’t hold anything back.
And it’s what we all love about her.
Though she’s been married to Carl for 55 years now, it seems like she had a bit of a wild dating history prior to meeting him. She told Jimmy Fallon earlier this year about a horrible date she went on as a teenager, and I can honestly say, I’ve never heard anything else like it.
She appeared on his True Confessions segment back in February, where she had to tell a story and Jimmy and the other guest, Noah Centineo, had to figure out if it was authentic or not.
Dolly swears up and down that this one’s true, and I’m not here to question the Queen, so we’re goin’ with it…
When she was around 17, she went out with a guy that drove a “really good car” (which is the only reason she dated him), and as it turns out, he was a complete asshole after she denied his physical advances one night:
“It was a put out or get out situation, so he kicked me out.”
She literally had to walk five miles from where he kicked her out back to her house, hearing bobcats and bears howling and rustling in the woods the whole way:
“Well this was up in the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee. We were about five miles from my home, and that’s way back in the mountains where there are bears and bobcats.”
Possibly worst of all, though, was knowing she could start hearing banjo music at any moment:
“There are those toothless, ‘Deliverance’-kind of mountain men in addition to the bears and all that, so that was not a pleasant place to be.”
If this all sounds like some sort of made-up story, Dolly swears it’s 100% true:
“It is true! It is true! I swear it’s true.”
Though it goes without saying, that guy missed out (an understatement at best), there’s always a lesson to be learned even in the worst circumstances life presents.
For Dolly, it was this:
“But I did learn something that night, though. I thought, if that ever happens to me again, I’m definitely givin’ it up.
I would rather be chewed on a boy than a bear.”
HA!
We must protect Dolly Parton at all costs.