Dolly Parton is kind of easy to pick out of a crowd, for a variety of reasons. First, she’s absurdly famous. Second, she’s got a lot of unique features, like the big hair, the beauty mark, and well, her own private mountain range on her chest. So you would think that she would have no problem winning a lookalike contest in which she was trying to look like herself, right?
As it turns out, Dolly herself tells the story about one time when she actually did think it would be fun to enter a lookalike contest that featured people trying to look like both herself and Cher. And here’s the kicker – all of the other contestants were drag queens. Obviously, she couldn’t go in looking just like herself, because then it’d be pretty obvious what was going on. So she exaggerated her makeup, puffed up her hair more than usual, and passed herself off as “some little short gay guy,” according to her.
And she actually lost. And it’s not like she came in second or anything, either. The way Dolly tells the story, she got the least amount of applause of any of the contestants, meaning that the real, live Dolly Parton entered a Dolly Parton lookalike contest and came in dead last.
This isn’t the only time a celebrity has lost a lookalike contest, either. Charlie Chaplin also supposedly entered a Chaplin lookalike contest and came in third. Hey, that’s not so bad, really. A bronze medal is still better than no medal at all.