I’m not saying I’m posing like one of Miss Mona’s girls here. But I’m not saying I wouldn’t fit in during “Hard Candy Christmas” either.
The song “Hard Candy Christmas” has been co-opted by radio stations as a Christmas carol, but it’s actually a melancholy tune sung by the sad whores of the Chicken Ranch in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas about what they’ll do now that they must disperse. As a young Texan whose family had connections to the real-life Chicken Ranch (we’ll get to that some other day), of course I got to see the movie version. As a young gay boy who had the chance to watch a Dolly Parton movie filled with naked men, of course I watched it a lot.
Anyway. I was always a fan of sad whores, even as a 6-year-old, and there were days on the schoolbus when the only thing that got me through was singing the chorus of this song to myself. But my favorite whore was the unsentimental one perched on the porch railing, the first one to spy the bus trundling down the dirt road. She’s sitting, singing along with everyone else, then she stands as she sees the bus trailing a cloud of dust. She sits down briefly (for strength), then hauls herself up like a tough broad AT THE KEY CHANGE and kicks her leg over the railing. I spent a lot of time acting out that choreography as a child. And sometimes even now.
Watch for yourself! The moment starts up at 3:13.
