Dolly Parton photo courtesy of Sugar Hill Records
December 1, 2006--On Sunday, December 3, the Kennedy Center will honor Dolly Parton for her lifetime of contributions to the arts and American culture. Dolly—whose fellow 2006 honorees are Andrew Lloyd Webber, Zubin Mehta, Smokey Robinson and Steven Spielberg—is only the second female country star to receive the Kennedy Center Honors (the first was Loretta Lynn in 2003).
The annual Honors Gala has become the highlight of the Washington cultural year. The 2006 Honorees will be saluted by stars from the world of the performing arts, as well as President and Mrs. Bush, at a gala performance in the Kennedy Center’s Opera House. The show will be recorded for later broadcast on CBS.
In an interview with The Baltimore Sun, Dolly discussed her current projects: a new CD with the working title Country Is as Country Does, which she hopes to release in the spring, and a Broadway musical adaptation of her first film, "9 to 5," which she expects to open in 2008. Between the two, she has written 47 songs in the past three months. "Now that I've had the floodgates open," she says, "the songs come every day. They're not all good, but some of them turned out real good."
On a different note, Dolly says that thanks to Botox and collagen, she hasn't had a recent need for "the whacking and the nipping and tucking." But, she quips, "I'll never graduate from collagen."