This morning was the day after the tenth anniversary of Dolly’s unveiling as celebrity cloned mammal, so consider this post a Bloody Mary to the grandiose hangover of Dollydom. She was sprung golem-like from the mammary gland (yes) of a Finn Dorset ewe & was yanked from the world by a lung virus…or very much would have been, if she hadn’t been given The Shot. She now holds somber court at the National Museum of Scotland; not quite Dollywood but give it some time…

Before you set “Jolene” on repeat and slip into a nice, depressing bubble bath (like David, Dolly’s Welsh mountain ram widower), here’s what her namesake has to say about the vicissitudes of flattery & the frustration of not being recognized as the parent cell:  

Q: Is it true that the world’s first cloned animal was named after you?

A: True. It was a sheep! There was a cow named Dolly once, but I lost all that weight! (laughs) So this was a sheep. They made the clones from a mammary gland and so the scientists said, ‘Well, we made this from the mammary glands so we got to call it Dolly.’ Yes, I was honored. I absolutely was. There’s no such thing as baaaaaaa–d publicity.

Q: Is it true that you lost a Dolly Parton look alike contest?

A: Yes! On Halloween. I don’t know if they knew it or not but I just went to be fun because they had all these Dollys down on Santa Monica Blvd. in L.A. I thought, ‘Well, this would be a great night for me to go out because everybody’s going to look like me.’ And they had the contest and I just got in line and somebody else won.