The Snow Globes and Shot Glasses of Dollywood

[View on the web]( [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [Instagram]( Essays [Searching for Souvenirs at Dollywood]( [Dollywood]( I have a plastic snow globe from Dollywood, Dolly Parton’s theme park in Tennessee. I bought it on my first visit, several years ago. The base is black and emblazoned with the word Dollywood in red, the “W” transformed into a butterfly in flight. On one side of the snow globe is a grist mill, on the other is a church, and there are pink flowers in the lower left-hand corner of each side. I keep the snow globe on the windowsill in my kitchen, so the grist mill and the church have faded in the sun. These are both real places at Dollywood: reproductions of the countless churches and grist mills that used to populate, or still populate, the Great Smoky Mountains beyond the theme park. The sticker on the bottom reads ITEM NO: GRIST MILL 00193 44084 RETAIL PRICE $4.99 MADE IN CHINA. It is not a valuable object, not in terms of money. And it is both of and not of Dollywood; it is a mass-produced souvenir from China. This is not my only souvenir from Dollywood. I also have several fridge magnets, the tickets from each of the three times I have gone, a shot glass, a Dolly ornament, a mug, a key ring, and a mock-old-fashioned sepia-toned photo of my friend Amanda and me dressed as saloon girls. I also have a thimble, although I found the thimble at an antique store and not at Dollywood. It was, at some point, someone else’s souvenir. I turn my snow globe back over and watch the snow fall. It is a hot June day in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, and I’m standing just inside Dollywood, looking over a large, cartoonish map. This is my third trip here, and I remember the park’s geography pretty well, but I still need the map. I like going to Dollywood in the summer because Dollywood feels like summer. I can hardly imagine it existing in the winter, apart from Christmas. When the park celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2015, I went that summer — my dog Millie spent the day at Doggywood, the park’s “Kennel and Pet Cottages.” And my first trip was with Amanda, a couple of summers before that. It’s a pretty drive from where I live in Winston-Salem, in central North Carolina. You head up into the mountains toward Asheville and through Cherokee, along the Oconaluftee River into Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where you might see elk grazing in meadows. Or a bear. Although Dollywood feels familiar to me now, it is still a little overwhelming. But anything associated with Dolly Parton is likely to be overwhelming. [Read the rest of the story here>>]( Ad from our sponsor Essays [Navigating the Intensely Gendered World of Hair Salons When You’re Queer]( [haircut]( My hair is a dark mass of broom-like bristles. It sticks out of my head in different directions no matter what I do, thanks to my Central and South American background. And while I’m usually pretty lazy when it comes to my appearance, it’s the one aspect I put effort into. Because even if I could afford to keep it short, to have it trimmed every two weeks, the intensely gendered world of hair care is simply too scary for a queer kid like me. Short hair on female-assigned folks has been considered an indicator of queerness for certainly as long as I’ve been alive. After I butchered my own mane at 14, my mother dragged me to a Supercuts in a Florida strip mall. I was coming into my sexuality as a brown kid in Orlando during the George W. Bush era, so feeling unwelcome followed me everywhere. And from the looks of the salon’s bare surroundings, from the walls to the expressions on everyone’s faces and the clothes they were wearing, I understood that this wasn’t a place where individual personality, style, or identity was supposed to be celebrated. For $9, I wasn’t looking for a makeover, just some simple maintenance, but things got complicated once the stylist told me to say "stop" once she’d reached the desired length. I never did, but that didn’t stop her from asking me, over and over, if I wanted her to, warning me throughout that I was “going to look like a boy.” Unfortunately, that wasn’t the last time I had an experience like that at a beauty salon; in fact, it’s essentially the only experience I’ve had in beauty salons. [Read the rest of the story here>>]( Did a friend forward you this email? [Sign up for the Racked email newsletter](. 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