DOLLY PARTON MEETS THE KIDS was a 1983 HBO special in which she is interviewed by five young teenagers (most of whom I suspect may have been actors given one, Paul King, briefly became a teen idol in TIGER BEAT and the like a year or so later). IMDb states it runs an hour however the print of the show I saw runs a half hour and appears to be complete. Sitting around a "living room" set, the kids ask Dolly all sorts of questions from "what's it's like to make all that money" to "do you think your body helped your career" and even touches on things like drugs and sex (Dolly is PG in her comments but still blunt, on the latter stating "Everybody thinks about it, even prudes".) She gets along wonderfully with the kids, who do ask good questions (whether some are scripted or not) and I was delightfully taken aback when Paul prefaces a question with "I don't really care for country music" and Dolly cuts him no under-age slack with her retort "Well, I don't really care that you don't care" that's both playful and yet sharply blunt. Dolly talks about many of her goals for the future some of which (Dollywood, still in the "thought" stages) have come to pass and others that haven't quite yet been fulfilled (a career writing books if one doesn't count her autobiography and an children's book adaption of Coat of Many Colors, but then there is always tomorrow for the ageless, ever creative Dolly). And of course she has also done things that she probably hadn't even considered at the time, like writing a Broadway musical. Discussing her writing she notes near the end of the program she has been writing songs since she was five years old and charms the kids and the viewer with that first song "Little Tiny Tassletot" which I would love to see Dolly one day record on a children's record, the melody is quite lovely and the lyrics endearing and appropriately spare for a child's song. This little program is a gem and holds up remarkably well almost thirty years after it's production.
